devilot76 said:
Do you need to know anything about Automator to do that? The only part of Automator I know, is that there's a funny little robot guy for an icon.
Could you elaborate a bit more for a newbie like me?
OK... here goes - it will likely end up very long but don't be alarmed - Automator is much easier to use that people think! Open up Automator and have a look - you'll see 2 columns , a workspace and a box on the bottom left.
The first column lists all the applications that Automator has workflows for, the second shows all the actions. If you select one application, the second column will only show the actions that work with it. The first column is in alphabetical order, the action one shows what Automator thinks is most relevant - so once you start building a workflow, it 'guesses' what action you need next.
The workspace is where you drag actions to and you can rearrange them there. They drop in as a numbered list which can be reordered - you'll see a little arrow dropping in from and to the preceding/next item in the workflow. This tells you what kind of files it expects to get to perform the workflow and what kind of files it outputs. If you get the wrong ones, it will highlight it so you know the workflow won't work.
Finally, the box on the bottom left gives details of what the currently selected action does so.
To run an application that would rename images and then import them into iPhoto, you'd do the following. (This assumes that you've already got them on your harddrive somewhere, or that you're using Image Capture to download them)
Choose Finder in the Apps column and then drag 'Get Specified Finder items' to the workspace. Don't worry about specifying them here - you'll be handling selecting files outside Automator.
If you're looking at photo images, they're probably already named sequentially so you can move straight to renaming. But if your staging folder has images from multiple cameras, you might want to add a 'Sort Finder Items' - just drag below the current actions in the workspace. You'd probably want to do it based on creation date.
Now drag the 'Rename Finder Items' to the workspace. Automator will ask you if you really want to change these original files or if you want to create a copy stage. This choice is up to you; I tend not to bother since I don't delete my images automatically from the memory card and I run this from a 'staging' folder. If you choose yes, it will add a 'copy' action which defaults to the Desktop (you can change it)
You've got a few options to play with in Renaming. First off, click on the 'Options' tag at the bottom of the action and check 'Show Actions as Run'. This means that when this application is run, it will throw up a dialogue box when it reaches this stage and ask you how you want to rename things.
The easiest way to do it is to choose 'Make Sequential' and then select 'add number to new name' - again you'll specify the new name when you run the app. You also choose whether you want spaces or dashes between the name and the number.
Now that your files have been renamed, you want to import them into iPhoto. You might want to do a 'Save As' on your current workflow though since as it stands, it's currently useful for renaming anything. If you save it as a 'Finder plug in', you'll be able to access it by rightclicking in Finder.
To import into iPhoto, click on iPhoto in the Apps column and drop 'Import into iPhoto' at the bottom of your workflow. Again you can choose whether to drop them into the Main Library or whether to drop them into a new album. And whether you want to delete them or not from their original location (or copied location). Again, if you choose 'options and show when run' you can make a decision on this each time.
OK... now you're ready to save it. If you save it as a Finder plug-in, you'll be able to highlight any images in Finder and right click to run it. If you save it as an application, you can add it into Image Capture's processes and have it automatically run whenever you import images.
Within Image Capture with a camera attached, you'll see a drop down box telling Image Capture what to do after download. By choosing Other from the box and navigating to your application, whenever you download images from Image Capture, it will ask you to rename the images and will import them into iPhoto with the correct file names.
If you always download all your images using Image Capture, you could add (instead of specified files) the 'Download images' tag so that the entire application can be run when the camera is plugged in. I don't do this since I prefer to use Image Capture as an initial quality filter to get rid of any really bad images. It also means that if there are two events on my camera, I can select and download event 1 with one name and event 2 with another.
