Automator: Every photographer deserves a tireless assistant.
Being a professional photographer could be pure bliss — if only you spent all your time conjuring the most spellbinding blends of light and shadow.
There are portfolios to get out the door. Queries to respond to. Countless images to name, annotate, organise and archive. Promotions, invitations and reminders to send to ever-shifting lists of contacts. Dozens of tasks that are just routine enough to be monotonous, yet just important enough to demand some portion of your valuable time and attention.
Tame the Tedium
For those tasks, Mac OS X Tiger offers an uncommonly useful solution.
It’s called Automator. In its power to dramatically recast the amounts of time you spend image-making versus administrating, it just might be the most awesome tool in Mac OS X’s arsenal. Because Automator brings all the ease of the Mac interface to a realm that was once the sole province of computer programmers: Creating automated Workflows that tackle your tasks, your way, with a click.
With Automator, it’s simple to create custom Workflows just by dragging, pointing, and clicking. Automator comes complete with a library of hundreds of easy-to-understand Actions, each designed to perform a single task. Drag several Actions into a sequence and you have a custom workflow that can execute a humdrum chore with admirable efficiency.
You never have to write any code. Each Action has all the options and settings you need. So you don’t have to work hard to figure out how to make it work.
Exemplary Efficiency
Say, for example, you need to share the results of a long day’s shoot with an art director across the country. Automator can search through your raw images, aggregate the files you’ve marked as selects, and rename them sequentially. Then it can scale every image, create an archive, attach it to a new email message, and send it. What may have required an hour of manual work is now accomplished with a click.
Once you create a Workflow, you can name it, save it and use it again and again. Run it with exactly the same settings or modify it to process new items you’ve selected — or items found using Tiger’s new system-wide Spotlight search. Share it with friends and colleagues. Launch it from anywhere by clicking its desktop icon. Or by choosing it from the system-wide Script menu or from Folder Actions in any Finder window.
Automation Addiction
Build just one time-saving Workflow and you’ll soon find yourself using Automator in dozens of ways. To swiftly tailor custom portfolios to specific types of prospects. To help keep you top-of-mind with art buyers, photo editors, and creative directors in the advertising and editorial worlds. To lure people to gallery openings, studio parties and events. To efficiently manage projects, people, schedules — and to consistently exceed client’s expectations.
Tip
Need to quickly rename a few thousand files? Select “Finder” from the list of applications in the Automator Library, then drag “Rename Finder Items” into your Workflow on the right side of the Automator Window. Automator will ask you if you’d like to work on copies of the files or the files themselves. Since we’re just changing file names, we’ll choose the files themselves. Now configure the settings as you need and save the Workflow as an Application — link two or more together for more complex naming structures. If you have a standard naming practice, you can configure the application once and drag-and-drop files onto your new application to change their names.
Olympic Automation
“Frankly, my most valuable asset is time,” says photojournalist Vincent Laforet. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, he relied on Automator to help him catch his breath. After filling a flash card with images, Laforet needed only to insert it into a card reader attached to his PowerBook — and immediately return to shooting. Image Capture automatically downloaded images into a specific folder on the PowerBook, then launched an Automator script after all images had been copied.
That script separated RAW and JPEG images into two different folders, moved the JPEGs into the public folder (so others could see them via AFP), copied the large JPEGs into another folder for resizing, scaled and recompressed larger JPEGs into smaller ones, and labeled the finished small JPEGs folder so that his photo editor — working in another, remote venue — would know that the task is complete. Laforet’s public folder mounted on the editor’s desktop for browsing in Aperture. “What gives you an advantage as a photojournalist, “are your wits, your eye, the amount of research you do, and the speed with which you can deliver images,” says Laforet.
