Filed under: Features, How-tos
Mac Automation: holiday photos
Now that you have downed the Egg Nog and feasted on the holiday food, it's time for the worst part of Christmas ... importing and organizing all those photos. Thanks to Automator and iPhoto, this task can be extremely easy. In this how-to, I will show you how to import your photos, carefully tuck them away in a new photo album, and e-mail them to friends and family. This tutorial assumes that you are using Mac OS X Leopard, and iPhoto 08; however it may work with Tiger and iPhoto 06.Importing Photos
- Download Pictures
- Import Files into iPhoto
Now, let's tweak some of the action's settings. In both of the actions, select the "options" button at the bottom, and select the check box "show this action when the work flow runs." This will allow you to use a different setting each time you use this work flow.
Now you have a basic photo importer that will quickly import files into iPhoto. Just connect your camera, and click Automator's "Run" button, and the photos are merrily imported.
Importing & E-mailing Photos
E-mailing a large group of photos can sometimes be a pain; but not with Automator. Let's take the above work flow a bit further and create an e-mail from the photos that you have on your camera.
For this work flow, you'll need the following actions (in the same order):
- Download Pictures
- Import Files into iPhoto
- Review Photos
- New Mail Message
Now to tweak some of the settings. For all the actions, select their "option" tab, then select, "show this action when the work flow runs." In the "Review Photos" action, select the "Approved images" check box, as this will allow you to e-mail only those images you approve. Fill out as much, or as little of the information in the "New Mail Message" action as you would like; when the action runs, you will be asked to supply the people that you want to e-mail.
Here's the walk-through of this work flow:
- Connect your camera to your Mac and click "Run" in Automator.
- A dialog will appear asking you to download the images from your camera. Click continue. (You can also check the box if you would like iPhoto to delete your images after you're done).
- Automator will then ask you if you would like your images to be placed in a new or existing album. Once you have selected an album (or typed in a new one), click continue.
- iPhoto will launch, import your photos, and add them the album you supplied in the last step.
- A Image Review dialog box will then appear allowing you to reject or approve images. You can use the flip image button to correct your images. When you see a photo that you want to e-mail, click "Approve." For the ones you don't want to e-mail, select "Reject."
- Once you have completed reviewing your photos, a new mail message will be generated. This message will include all of your approved photos in the body.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
David Fischer said 1:45PM on 12-25-2007
Two questions:
1) By "album" do you mean "Event"? If not, what "Event" is created during the import process?
2) Can you elaborate on the value in automating a process that's already essentially automated? When I connect my camera, iPhoto launches, asks for an Event name and meta-data, and then imports the photos. This automation seems to only make a simple process more cumbersome: I'll have to stop iPhoto's auto-import process, then run the importer and work through it.
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Cory Bohon said 1:51PM on 12-25-2007
No, if you do the steps above, it will create an "album," and not an "event."
This automation allows the user more control over the import process. You can also save this workflow as an application using the "Save As > File Format: Application." By saving as an application, you can reuse the application any time by connecting your camera and clicking on the app.
David Fischer said 2:26PM on 12-25-2007
Thanks for the feedback. I'm looking forward to more articles on automator. I've created my first, fairly complex, automation recently. But many kludges were required, so I'm hoping to find more elegant ways to do use Automator.
Steve said 1:46PM on 12-25-2007
I don't see the sense in setting up an automator thing to do this stuff, when a properly setup iphoto will do all of this virtually automatically by itself. For instance, to do this. all I would do is hook up my digital camera, turn it on, which makes iphoto start up the automatic downloading, so all I have to do is decide whether to import all or some, and then whether to delete the imports from the camera. Once they're imported, they're automatically in a new event, which is easy enough to name, which is virtually the same thing as an album, but easier. Then it's just a matter of selecting which photos to email, and clicking through a few options in the share menu, then in he email program adding the addresses you want. The overall thing takes fewer mouse clicks to do than if you set up an automator action to do it.
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Caleb said 1:55PM on 12-25-2007
My thoughts exactly!
Stephen said 10:54PM on 12-25-2007
Totally agree.
It seems heavy users of Automator look to automate things that are pretty much 95% automated. OK sure, I can't fire off an email automatically after the import, but who cares? It takes two seconds to multi select a bunch of pictures and click the email icon.
I really wish I could find uses for Automator, but perhaps I'm just not the target audience. I think it's really intended for Pro-Users because I can't find one thing I would like "automated".
Jack said 6:09AM on 12-26-2007
Well we all have to start somewhere. If the first tutorials showed me how to do insanely complex stuff it would probably take me a while to understand it.
For those who are totally new to Automator it's really useful to start with something that's fairly simple to get used to the App, even if the automations aren't of that much use at this level.
David Fischer said 9:11AM on 12-26-2007
I Automated this process:
(Connect Digital Camera)
* Quit iPhoto (which autoruns when camera is connected)
* Copy all MPG (video) files from digital camera to Movies folder
* Remove THM (meta files) from digital camera
* Run MPEG StreamClip and use Batch Mode to convert imported videos to QuickTime
* Delete original MPG files
* Run iMovie 08 and import QT videos
This process normally requires manual copying of files and working with three different applications. This automation was difficult to figure out, but I think it's working and it really simplifies the process.
Aaron said 3:09PM on 12-25-2007
my question is how to get automator scripts working with aperture in leopard. I know other people have had problems with this but I have yet to find a solution. Whenever I add an aperture action I get the following error:
*** -[NSNull length]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0xa03c0020
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jethro said 12:24AM on 12-26-2007
I got a digital picture frame, and I have all my photos from the last 3 years on my external hard drive. I would like to shrink them down in size (and resolution) so that I can fit more on a 2 gb SD card so that I can have all my pictures on the card.
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David Fischer said 9:06AM on 12-26-2007
iPhoto will do that for you, no Automator required. Select the photos of interest. Then use the resize command; it will export to a folder of your choice
Rich said 2:05AM on 12-26-2007
What would be useful is an automator program that will override the settings of iphoto and automatically change the file name of the photos to include the date they were taken and a sequential number. It is serious limitation to iphoto that this can't be done without individually renaming each file.
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koreyel said 9:53AM on 12-26-2007
Is this possible?
Use Automator to make an iSight camera function as a security webcam. When is senses motion it snaps and saves to a folder, and emails out the pic.
Or....
Use Automater to a make an iSight camera function as a simple webcam. Taking 1 picture every five minutes. Then pipe the pictures to iMovie to make a movie out of all the snaps.
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Rich said 10:30AM on 12-26-2007
Teach a man to fish...I "wrote" an automator app that dies what I wanted with the exception of the actual import into itunes. For some reason I get an error when I try and automate this even though I can do it in iphoto by just selecting import photos and pointing to the folder where the new files are located. Anyway, works well enough for a first attempt and I don't actually use iphoto all that much to organize pictures. Thanks for the inspiration.
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Ashley Grayson said 10:49AM on 12-26-2007
I think the initial commenters missed the educational approach of Cory's essay. Like "Hello World", the point of a tutorial example is not to be directly useful, but to illustrate a process by building it from familiar elements. However, Cory could have selected a task to automate, that is not already easily handled. He could have also eliminated the bewilderment by prefacing the essay with: "iPhoto already does this, but here's how it could be done with Automator." Keep in mind, this blog is about learning Automator, not optimizing iPhoto.
Here's a suggestion for a future column: a task that is potentially useful, not already possible and non-trivial. I've been around Macs for years and have no clue how to do this with Folder Actions or Automator.
Let's automate a folder, call it SendThis to have the following behavior: when a PDF file is placed in the folder, the automation script attaches that file to an email sent to a fixed list of recipients defined when the automation is set up. The Automation will only email the new entry, not any files already in the folder. Each incoming file name will be unique and not known to the Automation. Alternate method: It is acceptable to allow the automation to automatically copy the file to a folder called SendThisArchive as part of the automation so that the SendThis folder does not retain files.
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williamlane said 2:56PM on 12-26-2007
"It is serious limitation to iphoto that this can't be done without individually renaming each file."
Photos menus - Batch Change. Done.
Like many others I just don't 'get' the usefulness of automating what iPhoto already does. BEFORE I want to go emailing photos I want to check them over, RENAME them, and then send them.
My frustration with and misunderstanding(?) of Automator continues.
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Rich said 3:48PM on 12-26-2007
I stand corrected although I prefer the date format used in Automator. Many thanks for the tip!
Richard said 1:28PM on 12-27-2007
Thanks for these tutorials! As a new Mac user, I find them very interesting.
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TS said 12:19AM on 1-04-2008
Okay, try this one.... I want to use Automator to email a few people in my address book. I want to email them on certain holidays w/ a picture. Is dat possible?
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