Many of you are familiar with the Tiger program Preview. Perhaps you even used to curse its existence—until you successfully set up all your TIFFs, PDFs, and JPEGs to open in Photoshop or Acrobat instead of automatically launching in Preview.
At first glance you may wonder if there is even a point to Preview; it opens your files quickly, but it doesn’t do much else. But the basic tasks that Preview can perform are turned into speedy Automator actions when you need them, which may be more often than you realize.
Think of your disappointment when you receive a CD from a photographer full of JPEGs that are all rotated 90 degrees. Creating a Photoshop action to rotate all the files in the folder may be your first instinct, but the faster approach is to use Automator.
To rotate a folder or several folders from a CD or from files on your server:
- Select “Finder” in the Library column and “Get Specified Finder Items” in the Action column and drag to the window on the right.
- Click the plus sign and add your CD(s) or Folder(s).
- Select “Get Folder Contents” in the Action column and drag below window 1—select Repeat for each subfolder you find.
- Select “Preview” in the Library column and “Rotate Images” in the Action column and drag to the window on the right.
- You will get a warning that your images will be changed and the option to copy the items first. You will need to copy if working from a CD—click “Add”.
- In window 3, direct your copy to your server or hard drive; you have the option to replace existing files as well.
- Window 4 lets you choose how to rotate your files.
- Hit the run button at the top of the window and go back to work in Photoshop or another program while the files are copying and rotating.
Now save this window as a workflow with a specific name; it will now appear in the Library under My Workflows. But wait, you can still do more. Save it again using “Save As Plug-in”; give it a name and save it as a plug-in for Finder. Now when you put in the CD, control click to pop up the contextual menu. It will appear at the bottom on the list in the Automator section, and you can run it from there.
And as if that wasn’t enough, you can also save workflows as a plug-in for Folder Actions in order to create a hot folder out of your action.
Preview has many more tricks up its sleeve. To start with, it can apply ColorSync Profiles to your Images. This feature can both create greyscale images and change RGB colour spaces in your library. The Action shows the change with an image preview in the setup. It can also change your image type from JPEG to TIFF or to other formats such as PNG, JPEG 2000, or BMP.
The speed of Preview working in the background is where it really shines. Its feature of asking if you want to copy or overwrite your existing files, is great for moving files off CDs or DVDs.
Another situation we commonly face in which Preview is an asset is 40 inch files at 72 dpi. They’re a huge pain, since one can only scale to a minimum size in Quark and InDesign. The “Scale Images” feature of Preview gives you a choice of percent or pixel when scaling. You can also increase the canvas size of images to an exact amount with the “Pad Images” Action—which includes the option of scaling before padding.
Other useful Preview Actions include “Create Thumbnail Images”, “Crop Images”, and “Flip Images”. There are other Automator workflows that can be downloaded from http://www.automatedworkflows.com/automator/actions.html. The site has developed a set of Actions for Preview to filter files by ICC Profile.
These Preview actions can be done on any Mac running Tiger 10.4 or later, which means you don’t even need a copy of Photoshop to do all of these tasks. The little Preview program that didn’t seem to do much just got a little bigger.
Andrea Mahoney
Workflow Automation Specialist
TriBay Enterprise
416.729.9687 www.tribay.ca
