Advance The Man said:
The first thing I want to do is highlight say all of my April 2005 photos, go to automator and rename them April 2005-1.jpg, April 2005-2.jpg, etc. On the video they highlight it in Finder (I can do that), then they pop up a list of items with Automator as one of the options (I don't know how to do that).
OK...doing this at work without automator handy but here goes:
On the video, the reason they can right click and get the list with Automator as an option is because they've saved an earlier Automator sequence as a Finder plug in. You need to create the sequence and save it before it will appear for you.
Open up automator and click on 'Finder' in the leftmost column. That will bring up a list of all the actions that apply to the Finder. You want the 'Get Selected Files' one to drag over into the right hand space. Bear in mind that you're not specifying the files here - when you come to use this in the Finder later, the files you're highlighting there will be the 'selected files'.
Then you want to apply some actions to those folders (these are the things in the second left column). You want to use the Rename Files action. Drag that over into the right hand space. It may ask you if you want to copy the files or use your originals. If you say copy, you can specify which folder it copies them.
From rename, you've got a few options - rename to date is one of the options in the drop down list. You can choose the date format and how you want the sequence numbers added. You can also choose whether you're changing the name entirely or just appending information to the existing file name.
If you've got lots of images and they're not necessarily in the order they were taken (ie sorted alphabetically - if you have two different cameras with different file name formats), there's a sort action that you can use to re-order the files into 'creation' date order. Obviously you'd want to put this action before the renaming if you're using sequence numbers.
If you want to add a name as well (ie Wedding April 05 - 1, Party April 05 - 1), you'd have to add in two rename steps (the name one before the date one!). If you choose the option to 'see Action as run' then when you run the sequence, it should prompt you to fill in the name that you want.
That should be you. Save your workflow as is - so that you can tweak it if you want to (doesn't matter which folder you save it to - it will appear under 'My Workflows'. Then do a Save As and tell it you want to save it as a Finder plug-in and choose a name. Now you should be able to rightclick on those files in Finder and see the Automator > Name of Workflow as an option. (Obviously try it out on one or two files before you try it on an entire folder!)
Good Luck!
