Apple® Automator with AppleScript® Bible

Chapter 17. Ten Automation Projects for Photos and Images

IN THIS CHAPTER

• The projects

• Applying color changes to groups of images

• Cropping and resizing images

• Creating thumbnails

• Converting images

• Flipping and rotating images

• Finding specific images

• Importing images to iPhoto

• Exporting images from iPhoto

• Reviewing photos in a PDF contact sheet

• Automate taking pictures with a digital camera

Now that you've had some time to work with files, folders, music files, and audio files, you're becoming familiar with these mini-projects. It's time, though, to turn your attention to the world of photos and images.

Typically, unless you're a Web designer, illustrator, or other visual creative, you don't really work with photos unless you take a lot of pictures of gatherings, trips, vacations, and loved ones. In any case, you end up having to slog through a lot of files and do tedious, repetitive work with those files: matching colors, cropping, resizing, flipping, removing red-eye, and more. With any luck, the techniques you'll learn in this chapter will help to reduce the tedium.

The Projects

All of the projects in this chapter focus on one area: images and photos. If you're like most people, you'll end up with a lot of personal photos in your iPhoto collection — and if you're a professional designer, photographer, or illustrator, you'll have even more than the average person, as images are your stock in trade.

The ten projects I'm going to cover are:

1. Applying color changes to groups of images

2. Cropping and resizing ...