Snippid

I was going to write a post about some Asian candies, and I’ll get to that later, but in processing photos to be used for the post, I stumbled upon a great feature of Automator, an application available on Mac OS 10.4 or later.

Automator is a nifty piece of software that allows you to create “workflows,” or tasks that you’d like your computer to perform. This reduces the time needed to perform certain tedious or repetitive tasks in Finder, Safari, iPhoto, and other applications. In my case, I needed a way to rotate some pictures. First I tried to rotate them in Preview, but this didn’t work because Preview doesn’t actually rotate the image file itself — it merely rotates the way the image is viewed in iPhoto or Preview. To actually rotate the image file, I did a little searching on Google and found out that Automator can perform the task quite easily.

First, you open Automator, and it asks you what type of file or media you’d like to perform your task on. Choose the appropriate starting point, then click “Choose.” In my case, I chose “Photos & Images.”

Then there are a series of actions from which you can choose in a list, or you can use the search bar to try to find the action you have in mind. I chose Photos > Rotate Images. I dragged this action to the right-hand window to “build my workflow.”

To make this workflow accessible in the Finder, I went to “File > Save As Plug-in…”, named the workflow, and selected “Plug-in for Finder.”

Then, it was ready for use…

Hooray! There are other features of Automator that I haven’t explored, but it looks pretty full-featured, and quite easy to use. I recommend it for anyone who has a lot of photos or media to process on their Macs.