Automator

Because I upload images to several different locations, I often have to resize images after I’ve saved them to my hard drive. Rather than saving several different copies in Photoshop, I save one large image and then use an Automator action to resize the images for this blog. If you’ve never used Automator on OS X, I highly recommend checking out Automator: Your Personal Automation Assistant to discover new ways to automate tasks on OS X.

This morning while working on another project, I discovered that my Resize Image workflow wasn’t working. I upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday (no, I’m not going to say it), so I hazarded a guess that might be the reason my action wasn’t working anymore. After upgrading to OS X 10.6, you’ll need to update your Automator actions by turning them into Services. Here’s how to do that:

1. Open your old Finder workflow in Automator to use it as a guide.

2. Choose File -> New

3. Select Service as your workflow template.

4. Choose the kind of data input your service requires. I want my service to behave exactly like it did before, so I chose “Files or Folders” from the “Service receives selected” and “Finder” from the popup menus. If you want selected text to be overwritten with text specified in the workflow, select “Replaces selected text”.

5. According to the Automator Help documentation, I should have been able to select all in my old Automator Workflow and Paste the actions into the new one. I wasn’t able to do that, so using the old workflow as a guide, I created a new workflow with the same steps by dragging actions from the Library.

6. Save your workflow. After you’ve saved it, it will be available from the Services menu and as a keyboard shortcut.

Do you use AUtomator on your system? What kinds of tasks have you scripted?

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