- #AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT MANUAL#
- #AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT FULL#
- #AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT TRIAL#
- #AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT MAC#
While I have very simple needs, Name Mangler 3 comes with a plethora of features to create multi-step renaming workflows based on variables, metadata, and more – with an interface that’s always clean and “visual” in the way it deals with something that could easily become complex and cluttered. The renaming steps screen is what sells Name Mangler 3. If you want to keep the option disabled but still populate the list quickly, you can choose File > Populate with Finder Selection or hit CMD+P. My favorite small detail of the file list is that you can pre-populate it with files upon startup: in the Preferences, there’s a “Populate with Finder Selection” option that works exactly as advertised – select some files in the Finder, launch Name Mangler, and the files will already be listed without having to drop them inside the main UI. The file list on the left is where you drop files from the Finder, and where you’ll find sorting options (typical stuff such as Ascending/Descending, Creation/Modification Date, but also more advanced options such as “sort by Path”) and a preview of your files with their current name and the one they’ll get after the batch renaming process. Name Mangler’s interface is divided in two main panels: the file list and the renaming steps.
#AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT TRIAL#
Released a few weeks ago, I bought a Name Mangler 3 license 10 minutes after playing with the trial version because the feature set is fantastic. When I need to rename multiple files at once, I use Name Mangler 3 by Many Tricks. You can see how TextExpander supports strftime timestamps, and how I also told TextExpander to hit the Enter key for me so that Finder will exit the renaming mode automatically.
#AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT MAC#
There are plenty of ways to assign keyboard shortcuts to workflows, and I picked Keyboard Maestro because it’s always running on my Mac and I knew it was easy to set up an action to execute an Automator workflow: Obviously, I wanted to launch the Automator workflow as fast as possible without having to deal with any additional menus. With my Apple charts and graphs, this means I get images named “iPhone” and “iPhone_small”. The last three steps are rather self-explanatory: images are copied, “_small” is appended at the end of their name, and they’re scaled down to 650 pixels. The Finder dialog box that Automator pops up is fast, can come up with a pre-defined location (in my case, the Desktop), and it allows for multiple selection (through a checkbox). I ended up choosing the “Ask for Finder Items” action to make sure I could double-check the files I’m passing to Automator while I could have just told the workflow to automatically fetch the items that I had selected beforehand, I wanted a quick way to confirm the images that needed resizing. I feel like Automator is vastly underrated these days, and it actually comes with several options to interact with selected Finder items. The first step was to create an Automator workflow to duplicate all my images at once, reisizing them to 650 pixels, and appending “_small” to their filename. I decided to fix this before the Apple earnings call because I knew Excel was going to export our charts as large PNGs – but, mostly, because it really didn’t make sense to keep on manually clicking menus and selecting sizes after all these years of writing for MacStories.
#AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT MANUAL#
Until last month, the process of duplicating the larger image and saving it to a smaller size was entirely manual – something that, I later realized, was surprising considering I try to automate as many aspects of my daily workflow as possible. In either case, images are uploaded to our CDN with Cyberduck, which I have been using for years and that has never failed me.
#AUTOMATOR MAC RESIZE IMAGE BY HEIGHT FULL#
When I create images for MacStories, I either keep them at a single size between 600 and 650 pixels, or use two separate versions: the original larger size, and a smaller one that links to the full version. A few weeks ago, while I was preparing my coverage of Apple’s Q2 2013 earnings call, I grew tired of my system to resize and rename images on OS X, so I rebuilt it from scratch using Automator, Name Mangler 3, and TextExpander.