Female: Welcome to Mac Automation Made Simple. This series focuses on providing tips and tricks for using AppleScript to an Automator and Mac OS 10.
Male: Hello, and welcome back to Mac Automation Made Simple. I am host Ben Waldie. In this episode, we will be walking through the process of creating a simple automator workflow for Aperture. Like many other Mac OS 10 applications, Aperture comes with a number of actions. These actions appear in the photos category and Automator after installation. These actions allow you to automate some common tests in Aperture such as assigning keywords to photos, exporting photos, extracting metadata and more.
We will be creating a workflow that allows you to review and approves selected photos, imports the approved photos into your apperture library and assigns copyright information to them. Let us get started.
Start by creating a new Automator Workflow. Since this workflow will deal with photos. When automators starting point panel appears, click photos and images. Next, choose to get content from My Mac. And then set the workflow to use image files selected in the finder when the workflow runs. Then click the choose button.
The workflow is created and it gets selected, that finder items action is automatically inserted into the workflow. When this workflow runs, it will retrieve any images that are selected in the finder at that time and attempt to process them through the workflow. The next step is to review and approve the photos. Although, there is not an Aperture action for this, there is not iPhoto action and we can incorporate it into our workflow.
First, click the photos category and Automators library of actions. There are a lot of actions here, so let us narrowed down the list. In the search field, type the word review. The action we want is to review photos. Select it and drag it to the end of your workflow. Now, this action is already configured to return only the photos that we approved. So no further configuration is necessary here.
Next, we want to import any approved photos into our Aperture library. In the search field, type import, select the import photos action and drag it to the workflow. Now, we need to specify a projects in which they import the approved photos. I have already created a project in my Aperture library called approved photos. So I will leave that selected.
Finally, we want to apply copyright information to the metadata of the newly imported photos. In the search field, enter the word, “Metadata”. Select set IPTC tags and drag it to the workflow. Next, enter the copyright notice for any other metadata for that matter into the desired fields. For example, I will set the contact field to “Ben Waldie” and I will set the copyright notice to “Copyright 2008 automated workflows, LLC”. That is it. We are done with our workflow and we are ready to test it.
On my desktop, I have got a folder of photos that I took at the Grand Canyon. I would like to import these photos into my Aperture library, so I will go into the finder, open the folder and select the photos. Next, I will return to Automator and I will run workflow. Let me hide my dock here. First, the workflow retrieves a list of the selected photos in the finder. Next, I am taking three of the selected photos with an opportunity to approve or reject each one. So I will approve this one, approve this one, I will reject this one, approve, reject and approve.
Next, the approved photos are imported into the approved photos project in the Aperture and the metadata of the photos is automatically updated to include the specified copyright information. Now, I probably do not want to launch Automator and open this workflow everytime I want to import photos into Aperture. So I am going to go back in the Automator and let us save the workflow as an application instead.
When you are saving Automator workflow as an application, it automatically becomes drag and droppable. That is any files that you drop onto it, automatically get passed of the first action in the workflow as input. Because of this, if I scro
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