I understand when I make an automator 'application', it appears and can be drug to the applications folder. But when I make a folder action, or a service or whatever, where does the action go (so I can edit it again, later) or delete it?
View 1 RepliesI've been fooling around with Automator for a few hours trying to look for little ways it can handle my repetitive stuff. I've figured out some pretty neat tricks, but I also have a slew of unwanted folder actions and services in my context menus and for the life of my I can't figure out how to get rid of them. The folder actions are especially problematic since they mess with my files automatically. Googling it isn't turning up anything nor can I seem to find anything in Apple's help documents. Is this some kind of huge joke being played on me here or something? Has no one ever wanted to disable their automator tasks before or something?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI have set up and sucessfully tested a workflow which sends any file found in a particular folder to the "paperless" app, then moves all files to a different folder called "Archived attachments".HOWEVER as a folder action, nothing happens when a file is put into the folder. The file just sits there in the folder. To create a folder action I opened "new folder action" in Automator, then dragged and dropped the working workflow file into the workspace, then set "Folder Action recieves files and folders added to" the appropriate folder, let's call it "Attachments".Just to complicate things, the files are placed into the "Attachments" folder using an applescript that captures all pdf mail attachments. This applescript works succesfully. [code]
Info:
Mac OS X (10.7.1)
I managed to fumble my way through my first Automator actions today and after some trial and error, came up with a folder action that does exactly what I want, very simply to move music from my downloads folder to a different location. I also created an Automator application to do the same thing as I wasn't aware my folder action will now do this automatically (so cool). Here's my question: I have a few folder actions that were created during my trial and error process. Where are these and how do I delete/remove them? I did a Spotlight search and nothing came up.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI move an action into the workflow space. Now, I realize that I made a mistake (God forbid) and I want to remove that action. PLEASE tell me how in the world do I do that. I click on the 'x' in the top right corner and nothing happens. I click on it and press delete key. Zilch. I even drag it to the trash (out of desperation). Perhaps my Automator.app is corrupt. I can't think of any other reason I'm not able to delete an action from the workflow. How do I reinstall in Snow Leopard? I can't using the install disk because Automator is not one of the apps designated. Can I download it (the app)? I seem to be the only person in the universe that has this problem (not being able to delete an action). I've googled my fingers raw.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI really like iTunes 10. Clean, uncluttered, easily usable. BUT I have an automator action set for 7:30am every day as an alarm to wake me. This action plays a playlist in iTunes called "morning alarm" and has worked for months beautifully. When I loaded the action in Automator I got an error to say that the "play iTunes playlist" action, the auto iPhone sync action and set iTune volume actions we no longer valid. Those actions appear not to exist any longer in iTunes 10. Has anyone else had similar problems? Did you get a work-around?
View 5 Replies View RelatedDoes anyone know of any Automator Actions to modify System Preferences? Specifically I have the bottom right screen corner set to do Desktop Exposé when I point the cursor there, and I want to make a workflow to toggle this on and off. I've never used Automator before so I don't know a whole lot about it.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI've been scouring Google for an Automator action that will allow me to drop .doc or .docx files into a directory and convert them to .odt, but so far I've had no luck. Can this easily be done or does it require a lot of programming knowledge to pull off? I really hope someone can help as this is a repetitive task that would save me a great deal of time.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have automator running a weekly task of making a copy of a 10gb folder (database) and into copying 2 (120 seconds) minutes of the 10 minutes it is going to take automator comes back with an error "Finder got an error" Connection is invalid. I know its the size of the folder as i ran it on a different folder and ran successfully. How can i extent the "timeout" period of when it is copying a folder? it needs at least 10 minutes to copy 10gb.
View 2 Replies View RelatedIs it possible to write a workflow that can select files that are contained inside a folder package?
I am trying to automate a file copy of VMWare fusion 3 files to a windows machine on the network but I cannot seem to get any of the finder actions to give me an option to get inside the package.
I am new to Automator, and even though I have been tinkering around with it for about an hour, I can't seem to create an action.
What I want to do is have Automator automatically take the contents of a specific folder on my hard drive, print the contents of the folder (usually PDFs), then delete the files. I use dropbox, so when I place a pdf into this folder from my laptop on the go, it would be nice to come home to it printed, and no longer in the folder taking up space.
Every time I add something to my Dropbox, I get a pop-up saying "3 items have been added to your folder...would you like to view them?" I didn't enable anything on the computer.
View 1 Replies View RelatedLike it would move anything immediately to the downloads folder. Would love to have something like this cause the wife has the desktop like whoa.
View 4 Replies View Relatedhas anyone achieved/know how to achieve this? drag and drop a wav, mp4, ogg, etc onto a folder and have it covert to an mp3. is there a audio converter app that plays nice with folder actions?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI'm new here but hoping I can find some helpful information for a new problem I have with OS X. Earlier today, I noticed that my Transmission was failing to download some torrents I was snatching. Transmission couldn't create the folders I was telling it to create for new CDs in my MUSIC folder. When I looked into the problem, I noticed that I no longer had the option to create new folders and several other modification options. I created a new folder on the desktop and dragged it into the misbehaving MUSIC folder and my MacBook asked me for my password to "authenticate". What's going on? I have not encountered this issue before and it is only effecting the MUSIC folder; all of the sub-folders are functioning correctly.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI set up a few automated workflows with automator to take certain actions if different types of file are dropped into a folder (Downloaded etc)
I had 4 working perfectly but for an unknown reason they all suddenly stopped working and i can't work out why.?
Info:
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Does anyone have some experience running multiple folder actions at the same time?I've written a Applescript folder action that processes some files. When adding some files, the script starts and all goes well. The processing of each file takes a few minutes, but all files are processed correctly.However, when adding some new files to the dropfolder, while the folder action is all ready processing other files dropped a few minutes earlier, the process that is all ready running immediately aborts and the folder action is relaunched on the new files, leaving the old files for what they are.The same problem occurs with multiple folders, each having a folder action attached. When dropping files in "Folder A", the script starts processing. But if someone droppes files in "Folder B", The script of folder A aborts, and the script of folder B starts processing. When adding more files to the folders, the result is the same. In some casses, when the last dropped files are processed, the os continues where the operation was aborted on the previous files. But this not always happens. To make things worse, when you remove the items from the folders afterwords, the folder actions starts running again on items no longer present in the folder ..Does anyone know how I can prevent the folder action being aborted when new files are dropped and placing the new files in "Hold", until the previous files are processed? How can I prevent a folder action being aborted when a item is dropped into another folder?I've written a small script to test this behaviour. Just create one or more folders and attach the script below. Drop a item into the folder, wait a few seconds and drop another one in the same or another folder. To monitor what happens please check the console. [code]
Info:
Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I'm working on an automator actions in Snow Leopard to convert a bunch of small groups of images that i have to single PDF files with multiple pages. What is want it to do exactly is take an input of several files, turn them into pages of a PDF, then give that PDF the name of the first file and then save it in the same folder as the first file, or something to that effect. Essentially I need the output to go to the same location as the source and to have the same name as any one of the files. It seems really simple, but I've googled and dug around Automator to no avail; I've managed to get every step except saving the output file where I want it.
The other ideal thing would be for it to run through a folder and go into all of its subfolders and combine each group of images into a different PDF file. In other worlds, if folders B and C are inside folder A, I can select folder A and it will go into folder B and make a PDF out of all of the images inside folder B and then go into folder C and create a PDF out of all of the images in folder C, etc.
I'm traveling tomorrow to Europe and am only taking my iPad and camera. I'm planning on using an SD card reader to upload my photos/videos to my iPad, then use Dropbox on the iPad to copy my daily shots to my Dropbox account. I'm thinking that I'll have an AppleScript on my home computer's /Dropbox/europe/ folder to look for newly added data and then auto import that into iPhoto. What's the best way to handle this? I got it working with a couple of test images but when iPhoto sees photos that it's already imported it asks me if I want to import in the duplicates or skip them. I'd like to skip them or write the AppleScript in a way that handles this. I'm also fine with copying the photos out of the Dropbox folder into a separate folder elsewhere and not using iPhoto. I'm just trying to theft proof my data in case my iPad gets stolen or if my Dropbox goes goofy and deletes the photos. Maybe copy newly added data to a designated directory outside of the Dropbox folder? How can I do this?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
I had a simple folder action created in Automator that scaled images to 800 pixels whenever i added files to a specific folder. It does not work anymore. I have tried recreating the action in a new folder and all i get is a warning: "The action “Scale Images” was not supplied with the required data."
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I created a folder action in Automator and can't find it to edit it or delete it. I've looked everywhere I could think of and ran a spotlight search but I can't find the .workflow document. All I want to do is delete the workflow.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
What I try to do is pick a photo from a defined folder ("gallery"), scale it and upload it to my Wordpress side. I automatically want to run this workflow every morning at a specific time so that the pictures changes everyday. It may sound strange that almost everything is done but two things are missing:
a) How do I tell Automator to use a random file from the "gallery" folder? How do I tell it to use the "gallery" folder in the first place?
b) How do I schedule that task? Is there a scheduler function somewhere that I missed?
Right now I use it manually as a service for images - that's why the first action is the copy action.Once the picture is scaled down to 230px and loaded into the folder "image_upload_temp" Hazel will take the file and upload it. I need to copy the file first to keep the original and scale a copy and then move it to the target folder because Hazel shall not upload the unscaled but only the scaled version.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 15", 8GB
I have about a gagillion html files that I need to open, run a firefox plugin action and close. At this rate, it's going to take a really long time. I'm wondering if there's a way to automate the action so it performs it on every file in a specified folder?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI am trying to set up a folder action to do the following... When a file is added to the "images" folder a new dated subfolder would automatically be created, and the file would be moved to this new dated subfolder.
Here's what I have so far (which I'm sure is way off base)
1) Folder action receives files and folders added to "Images"
2) Filter finder items - Find files where ALL of the following is true: Kind is ANY
3) New Folder - Name is "_" Where: "Images"
4) Add Date or Time to Finder Item Names: Add Date to folder name
5) Move Finder Items: This is the step that I'm stuck on. I don't know how indicate the newly created folder in step 3
Another question I have is how to make automator check to see if there's already a subfolder with the current date and put the file in that subfolder instead of creating a new subfolder with a duplicate name.
Info:
MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
i tried to see if anyone was able to create something like this and i think that the automator script that i got only created a folder with /todays/ date. what i am hoping for is a script that will /constantly/ update the name of the folder to todays date. the reason i need this is that if i have one of these in my documents folder it allows me to easily see /when/ the last successful backup occurred on my external drives. it is a really nice comfort to see this easily and know quickly that the backup was successful.
View 3 Replies View RelatedAfter cleaning up my house and noticing I have a very lengthy movie collection I decided I should probably back them up incase anything happened. I have been thinking of investing in another mac to do this. (just gives me a reason to give the lady of the house an excuse to buy one haha) But I was wondering is there any way I can just Rip my dvd's straight to .iso? I figure if i ever need a copy iso would provide me the quick way to make it. I cant find any straight software that rips to iso. Im preferably looking for free software but I wouldn't mind investing 30 bucks or so in a decent app. I also assume if its an iso I should be able to just burn it to a new dvd with Disk Utility. Is this correct or will the software be capable of doing it.
View 3 Replies View Related-Import files one at a time into 3rd party application using Automator. Challenge: -The application has no way to program a key command for edit > insert > file (that I could find)Failed tries with Automator:Recorded a "watch me do" sequence using the mouse. Sometimes it works and sometimes it glitches badly; the cursor moves very slowly in places I never recorded and the script runs for several minutes until I press the restart button. I believe that nothing changes on the machine between attempts - very peculiar.Recorded a "watch me do" sequence using 'control' + 'function' + 'f2' to highlight the apple in the menu bar at the top of the screen then navigated to edit > insert > file using the arrow keys. Unfortunately it doesn't work when run. In the workflow,"'control' + 'function' + 'f2'" is shown as"'control' + '(a symbol I don't know - see attached screenshot line 1 of the workflow)'"The arrow keys pressed are then not recognized at all. (Line 2 in the workflow is from pressing return.)A seemingly simple task is really perplexing me. I'm sure there's a simple solution though.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI have a bunch of images in a folder and say I want to do something like the following to them
The original image name is
2575-W.jpg
Say I now want to take the first 4 digits and and add 645 to them to get 3219
how would I do this in automator any other mac application
(I have like 5,000 photos I need to do this for)
I am trying to convert a text file to an audio file by using 'text to speech'. Originally, the text was created in Pages but just in case I also saved it as an rtf file. I want to save it as an mp3. Also, once I've got the workflow, I would like to use this again with other text files. I know I can save the workflow and I can do the task by Automator, but I must be doing something wrong. Should I use the 'record' function? What am I doing wrong? I called AppleCare but of course, after 15 minutes they recommended their online discussions. They don't know anything about these basics. The guy asked me, what I tried. I told him that I tried Terminal, but I was confident that Automator and creating a workflow would be the solution for me. He didn't even know where Automator was. I suppose, this was the last time that I purchased an AppleCare.
View 2 Replies View RelatedCan anyone do me a favour and write me a automator script that can, open address book, find all contacts that contain a dash in numbers and a space in the numbers then remove them from all contacts?
View 1 Replies View Related