how to use automater

[wrxguy]

I am fairly new to Mac's and I am curious if anyone could help use Automater... I get the impresion it is quite usefull but im just not sure how to use it

 

[puckhead193]

i'll second that! i wish apple had a workshop or something for it at the local apple store.

 

[macbaseball]

I'd just like to see a simple PDF on Apple website, that I could print out and then follow the instructions. Everyone says once your in Automator it's easy, but I just need somewhere to start. I don't understand how the different flows work, but then again I usually quit after 10 minutes of messing around with it.

 

[iHateWindows]

I don't find it very useful.

 

[Applespider]

Open up the example workflows in Automator and see how they're structured and work your way through them, running them on some test files.

Basically, you need a source of files/URLs/Events to start the workflow with and then just drop a trail of actions onto them. Automator is pretty good about telling you what source files/URLs/Images it needs at the start of an Action and what the end product of the Action will be.

One thing that threw me to start with was the 'Get Specified Finder Items' since I didn't know exactly what Finder items I wanted to do things to yet so how could I tell Automator! Once I figured out that it just meant that if I highlighted Finder items when I wanted to run a plug-in, it all made a little more sense.

 

[cooknwitha]

My first automated action was renaming photos and resizing them to include in an email and it was so easy! So full of confidence I tried to do the PDF watermark workflow and that's when my confidence ended. I just can't get it to work.

So put me down for a help file from Apple. I just don't understand why the watermark PDF workflow isn't working!!

 

[illegalprelude]

I agree. they need to have a good amount of workflow examples on their site or something. that stuff is tricky

 

[yenko]

I am fairly new to Mac's and I am curious if anyone could help use Automater... I get the impresion it is quite usefull but im just not sure how to use it

Try this:

Apple how to

 

[WillMak]

I'm still confused on what automator even does!

 

[Sca1pel]

Its like batch processing...easy for me when I get my CRW's into Tiff's

 

[asif786]

tomorrow's mactv is a brief introduction to automator. i'll try and get the link on macbytes when it comes online

 

[hugin]

My first automated action was renaming photos and resizing them to include in an email and it was so easy! So full of confidence I tried to do the PDF watermark workflow and that's when my confidence ended. I just can't get it to work.

So put me down for a help file from Apple. I just don't understand why the watermark PDF workflow isn't working!!

I just wasted half an hour trying to get the Watermark PDF workflow to work. It must be a bug. I will report this to Apple. Please do so you too.

 

[achie25]

My first automated action was renaming photos and resizing them to include in an email and it was so easy!

that sounds very useful. how did you do it? could you post the steps for doing that?

 

[gwuMACaddict]

edesign needs to make a sticky thread about it. kind of the the noob FAQ thread.

 

[XNine]

I will write up a brief tutorial tomorrow for it. Groovy?

 

[MontyZ]

.

 

[Applespider]

Here's a brief guide I wrote out on how to change filenames before importing into iPhoto.

It also runs through the basic structure of the screen and what things do.

Link to automator walkthrough

 

[starrin]

I have worked through a couple examples ... but something I really want to do has to do with the Terminal.app

I would like to have part of my workflow ssh into a server ... cannot figure out how to do this... any ideas?