24 Dec 05 Automator kicks ass

I’ve never used Automator until earlier this week. Automator is a new feature Apple released with Tiger this past May. Now I’ve used the other new features that Apple released with Tiger like Dashboard and Spotlight, but whenever I loaded up Automator it looked confusing and I never really dabbled into it.

This week I got pictures developed by the local Walgreens and I had them include a picture CD for each roll (3 rolls total). Now the quality of the picture CDs were disappointing, however I figure I would copy them all to my hard drive and upload them to my gallery. So I import the pics into iPhoto and select the ones from our Mt. Rainier vacation (as they were spread on to two different film rolls). I then exported them to a different folder on my hard drive so I could prepare them to upload them to my gallery. However the names were all funky.

At this point I have three options:
1. Upload the photos with the weird funky names
2. Rename each and every single one of them
3. Use Automator

I opted to try #3. There is probably a bash command which I could have done, but my fu with Bash are only limited. I load up Automator and basically you select the program you want the command to be performed under. In this it is Finder. Then basically like a flow graph you select what Automator should do in each stage. The first one is to locate the files that need renaming, thus I selected the folder where the files I wanted to import where located, dragged them into automator. Next I selected the renaming step and entered in that I wanted all files to start with mtrainier. It will add the numbers it self in sequential order.

Here is a pic of the final screen before automator automates my renaming…

I think this is the coolest feature yet, but thats just my opinion.