Automator?
Hi,
I am new to Mac and have been experimenting with Automator (love the concept!) but can you please explain to me how to use it to batch process images for all of this?
I figured out how to resize (scale) the images, but the Service is only available from within Finder windows (ie: right-click image(s) and run my Scale service). I can't do it from within programs such as Adobe Bridge (which is what I'm using to organize my photos). It would be handy to be able to access my automated process from within Bridge, is there a way to do that?
Also, I could not figure out how to do this:
I want to resize (scale) down my photos, then have them saved in a folder within the original file's folder (such as: the originals are in Pictures/Christmas) and I want to put the resulting resized pictures into a new folder (such as Pictures/Christmas/Resized).
The catch is: I want Automator to detect which folder the images I want to process (the ones I've selected in Finder) are in, and create the new subfolder within it, but because the name of the parent folder will change each time I run the automation (for example, I go to the beach one day and shoot, so then my parent folder will be Pictures/Beach and the next day I shoot at a park so the parent will be Pictures/Park), I haven't figured out how to do this part? The newly created folder can always be named "Resized."
How do I do that in Automator? I see that there is an option for variables, which I played with some, but I couldn't figure it out. I believe variables would hold the key, because the variable could contain the name of the parent folder somehow, but I don't know how to use Automator well enough to figure out how to do this part.
And of course, finally...how do I use Automator to watermark my images?
All of this hopefully will be in one Automator (program? script? service? I'm not sure what the proper term is here). Ultimately, I want to set it up so that it:
1) scales/resizes the image (I got that part figured out, but only saving to one set folder location for now, the Desktop; want to do it as described above though).
2) apply my watermark image to the lower right-hand corner of the image, padded in and up a little from the corner so it looks nice.
3) save the images to the newly created "Resized" folder within the parent folder.
And maybe, hopefully...
4) Upload the images from the "Resized" folder to flickr/facebook.
Any help at all would be great, including suggestions for books/sites/materials to read on how to use Automator so I can learn more.
Sorry, I realize this is a big request, but I just haven't found what I'm looking for by Googling it. The closest I came to finding anything that helped was a site that had a bunch of additional Automator actions, which got me a little closer (one was able to get the name of the parent folder and pass it on to the next action), but I still wasn't able to figure out how to actually use that info it passed on.