Filed under: Features, How-tos, AppleScript
Mac Automation: Integrating Spotlight searches with your workflows
We've discussed some pretty neat uses for Automator workflows in the past, but did you know you can easily integrate Spotlight searches into your automation workflows? Well, you can, and it might be easier than you think. In this Mac Automation post, I'm going to show you how you can integrate it into a workflow that will burn the resulting files to a CD or DVD. Creating the workflow
To create this simple workflow, you'll need to use two actions. Find the "Spotlight" action and drag it to your workflow section; then, find the "Burn a Disc" action and drag it below the newly added Spotlight action. That's it; your workflow is now completed, but we need to tweak the actions.
Using the workflow
To test the workflow, you can enter a search term in the Spotlight action, and a Disc name in the Burn a Disc action. Insert a rewritable disc, or a regular CD/DVD, and click the "Run" button in the upper right corner of the Automator window. Automator will then go to work finding all of the search terms that matched files, then will then burn all found items to the disc. This could take a while to burn, depending on the resulting files.
Remember that all of the Spotlight tricks, such as exclusion, denoting kind, etc. are still available even though you're using the Automator action.
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