Color me Impressed – Automator Continues to Amaze
From its beginnings in Mac OS X Tiger, Automator has been getting rave reviews. Automator opens up automation for the non-technical and allows for practically anyone to create powerful workflows. Since I’ve been an AppleScripter since System 7 Pro I’ve never really used Automator much. I found its building blocks approach to be limiting and I could usually get more done faster with straight AppleScript.
Today I was thrown by what I could do with Automator easier and faster than straight AppleScript…
I wrote an AppleScript to export the metadata from images so that I could keep things safely offsite… the AppleScript takes literally days to run on my 34,000 image Library. The above Automator Workflow is much, much faster but doesn’t export some of the tags that my AppleScript does…
Time to connect Automator and AppleScript…
Technorati Tags: Aperture, AppleScript, Automator
This post has 2 comments
February 3rd, 2009
Seems very powerful. I’m just curious why you want to export your metadata from images. If it’s in your EXIF it’s there. Is there a reverse action of importing metadata to images?
February 4th, 2009
This method will preserve both EXIF and IPTC. I am currently planning on using this for my online backup strategy. Probably. The process is in the works, but this is a great way for me to automatically get my metadata backed up and safely offsite.
It is also an easy way to get the data into a database for any form of number crunching I may want to do.