Using Automator in your Digital Photography Workflow

May 11, 2005 by Ben Long
Filed under: Features 
I’ve been slowly upgrading my assortment of free Automator Actions for Photoshop, but just because you have the Actions doesn’t necessarily mean you’re comfortable with using them. Fortunately, Automator is a breeze to use, even for those with no scripting experience of any kind. What really gives Automator its power, though, are some of the less-obvious ways in which it can be integrated into the rest of your digital photography workflow.

This article shows how you can use Automator – and Photoshop, Preview, iPhoto, the Finder, and any other apps for which you have Automator Actions – to operate directly on images, without having to open any applications.

Related Links:
AppleScript for Digital Photographers
Taking Action with Photoshop Actions

Buy a copy of Photoshop CS 2 for the Mac at Amazon.com.
Buy a copy of Photoshop CS 2 for Windows at Amazon.com.

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Comments

9 Comments on Using Automator in your Digital Photography Workflow

  1. SD on Wed, 18th May 2005 2:32 pm

    2. Very nice !! Does this work with Photoshop Elements ?

  2. Ben Long on Wed, 18th May 2005 9:24 pm

    3. Alas, Elements doesn’t have AppleScript support, so we’re stuck until Adobe adds AppleScript support or releases a lower-level API for Automator support.

  3. Saadiq on Mon, 27th Jun 2005 3:14 pm

    4. These actions look great. I was wondering if there is an action for opening raw images. I attempted it and it balked. I just wanted to check if I was doing something wrong. Thanks.

  4. Peter Keverne on Wed, 16th Nov 2005 4:32 pm

    5. Re the Actons download are there similar downloads for PCs (not Mac)

  5. cosimo on Wed, 30th Nov 2005 9:46 pm

    6. Wow! I cant thank you enough for the CS2 pshop automator actions and for explaining automator to me. Thanks!

  6. Ben Long on Thu, 16th Mar 2006 2:39 pm

    7. Sorry Sue, but Elements 3 doesn’t have any AppleScript support, so this stuff only works with CS and CS2. There’s no AppleScript support in Elements 4 either, so I don’t expect this is something that Adobe will ever add to the product.

  7. Steve on Thu, 1st Jun 2006 6:43 am

    8. Does it work with Photoshop 7?

    Thx

  8. Complete Digital Photography » Photo Renaming Automator Actions v2 on Wed, 22nd Nov 2006 1:46 pm

    9. [...] These actions require Mac OS X 10.4 or later and are designed to work within Automator. (If you’re not familiar with Automator, here’s a quick overview and tutorial.) [...]

  9. Shirley Hicks on Tue, 7th Oct 2008 1:40 pm

    10. Add the WordPress Akismet plug-in to screen out the spam.

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