Practical Uses for Automator?

What are they? I don't use it, but really can't think of any good uses for it either...

anyone care to enlighen me?

thanks.

I don't use it either, but good uses for it are resizing a 1000 pictures so you don't have to sit there and do it you can make automater do it. There are more but that is the only one I have actually used it before.. i haven't used it since..

The reason to use it is if you have a repetitive task that you need to preform a large number of times. Like resizing 1000 pics, as PowerBookG4 suggested.

The only time I have tried to use it was to merge to Mac. I mounted my old Windows computer over the network, and wanted to take every mp3 on my old computer and see if it was in my iTunes library. If so, ignore, if not, add it to the library. Never actually got it to work because Automator was just too simplistic (no conditional statements that I could find, had to use AppleScript).

The only use i've found for it is to keep my folder of different wallpapers organized. When I download new ones, it changes the name to wallpaperXXX.jpg and resizes them if they are bigger. Other then that, it's been too simplistic as claudius said for anything else I've wanted to do.

It is a very helpful tool if you want to rename tons of pics. (eg. pics. from your camera), Move large amount of files from one location another, search and delete duplicate songs from your iTunes folder, etc,. Have a look in this website. You will find plenty of other good examples.

I don't use it nearly as much as I would like to, but there are times when it really comes in handy. Some of the workflows I use the most are batch resize, batch rename and add to itunes. These are the only ones I currently use, but I could see myself using it more often in the near future.

I used Automator twice as a quick hack to record off air radio in the morning. When I leave for work, a program I like may have an interview going on or coming up, or special event I want to listen to. So I used Automator to record the program until it ends at 10am. Quicktime has several Automator commands that make this possible. I'm not sure if the Pro version is required.

I hook up a portable radio to the mic/line in port and leave it on, then run the Automator script. The script has a time out option that I have to calculate that will end the recording. Like I said. A hack.