#How to use automator mac mac

Open a Finder window, find and select one or a more photos, then click and drag them to the Rotate Images.app icon. Name it Rotate Images.app and save it to the desktop (it’s convenient to place it there, but it can be moved to the Applications folder if you prefer). Apps created with Automator do not show anything on the screen unless your tick this option. What if you want to rotate them to the right? Click Options and tick Show this action when the workflow runs. Rotate Images offers Left, Right and 180 degrees in the menu to the left of the thumbnail images.Īs it stands, this Automator app would only rotate images to the left every time. We want to perform an action on photos, so we could drag photos from Finder and drop them on the app.Ĭopy Finder Items will copy them to the desktop (several other disk locations are available in that To list if you want to save them elsewhere). What it means is that you can drag files from a Finder window and drop them on the app icon. 4 Copy Finder ItemsĪt the top it says Application receives files and folders as input. We now have a simple Automator script that can be turned into an app. The app we are creating will rotate images and you should always work on copies of photos and not the originals, so you can always go back to the original and start again. It offers to add a Copy Finder Items action. A warning appears that the action will change the images passed to it. Drag Rotate Images and drop it in the large empty area on the right. Select the Photos library in the first column and Rotate Images in the second column. Select a library like Calendar for example, and the list of actions that can be performed on the Calendar app are listed.

Each library contains a collection of actions. The Automator window opens and there are two columns on the left. We will create an application becauser that is the simplest. It then asks you to choose the type of document you want to create. Start Automator from the Applications folder and it prompts you to select an Automator app on the disk drive or to create a new document. The app here does that for you and it can batch convert dozens of images at a time.

#How to use automator mac mac

The images might come out that way when they are transferred to the Mac and they must be rotated through 90 degrees either left or right before they can be viewed. Sometimes when you shoot photos you hold the camera or phone vertically instead of horizontally. In this guide we will create an app that enables images to be rotated. It is really clever and some great utilities can be created with it. Save the result and you have a fully working app that you can use yourself or give to others to use on their Macs. To build your own macOS app that will run on any Mac all you have to do is to choose the blocks and put them in the right order. However, it makes programming just about as simple as it can possibly be by providing the building blocks for an app. However, it probably is not used as much as it could be because it looks complicated and scares off people that don't know anything about programming. What is Automator?Īutomator has been bundled with macOS for years and it is a powerful and flexible tool that can be used for many purposes. This guide takes you step by step through your first app. Automator is a sort of programming tool that enables you to create utility apps on the Apple Mac but it does not require any programming knowledge.