Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required
Even if you’re not a programmer, you can easily create tiny, time-saving applications that breeze through repetitive tasks—renaming large groups of files, executing terminal commands, and much more—with the simple, code-free, drag-and-drop interface of OS X’s built-in tool, Automator.
For those of you who don’t know, Automator is a program that allows you to create your own workflows, through the use of drag-and-drop actions, that automate repetitive tasks. We’ve featured numerous Automator workflows and applications on Lifehacker before, but you may not know how easy it is to make your own. You don’t need to be a programmer or hacker to make use of Automator, either—anyone can make use of this simple (yet powerful) tool, no matter what menial task you need to automate. Here’s a quick guide to using it, as well as a few examples to get the gears turning.
Creating a Simple Workflow in Automator
One of the easiest ways to use Automator involves creating workflows that perform batch operations. It only takes a minute or two to put together a workflow, thus saving you tons of time renaming files, cropping photos, or converting PDFs to an editable format.
Anatomy of a Workflow
Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required
An Automator workflow is a simple series of actions that perform in sequence. You can select any number of actions from Automator’s large library, and drag them into whatever sequence you want. When you run the workflow, Automator will go through each step, pushing the output from the last action into the next action. Thus, you can have an action that grabs some files, pass those onto an action that edits them, pass those edited files on to another action, and so on. It’s essentially programming for the non-programmer—you tell it what to do each step of the way.
Batch Rename a Group of Files
Let’s say we have a series of files that we want to be able to look through, but their filenames are a mess. A common example of this problem involves digital photos. Every time you copy photos from your camera to your computer, they have names like PICT_001, PICT_002 and so on. Say you want the filenames to actually convey something about where the photos come from, like “Italy Vacation 001″, “002″, and so on. Or, if you prefer, you can add the photo’s date and time after each filename, so you know when each photo was taken. With just the action “Rename Finder Items,” you can manipulate a group of filenames any way you want. You can even change a filename’s case or find and replace text. For this example, we’ll assume each group of photos is already sequential, and that we just want to give them a more descriptive name.
via Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required.
