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Automator Actions for Web Designers

I’ve just updated two of my Automator actions, and added another one. You’ll find these particularly useful if you’re a web designer or developer. I personally use these as Finder plug-ins, so I can just select some files in the Finder, right-click, and choose the action from the Automator menu. It’s a huge time-saver.

If you’ve used any of my Automator actions before, you’ll see a big improvement here. Before they were just plain AppleScript, with no easy way to set options. They’re now proper actions with new options you can set easily, making them much nicer to use.

Save as JPEG is the new one. It will export images in JPEG format using the Save for Web option in Adobe Photoshop CS. If you don’t have Photoshop, then the built-in image support of Mac OS X will be used to convert the file. I use this mainly to convert Photoshop roughs so I can show them to clients. I select a bunch of files, right-click and choose Save for Web from the Automator menu, and then I’ve got JPEGs of all my roughs. Then all I have to do is upload them to my server, and with Tense Index installed I’ve got an instant gallery.

Make Names Web-Friendly converts the names of the selected files to all lowercase, removes accents, changes spaces to underscores or dashes, and converts other special characters to underscores or dashes. If you just upload a file with a space in it, or some other special character, your file names can get ugly… Spaces will turn into %20 for example. Uppercase letters can also complicate matters, since many web servers are case-sensitive. With this action you’ll get friendly, pretty URLs every time.

Change Extensions will change the file extension of the selected files. Note that it will not change the format of the file, so if you use it carelessly your files may not open. If you’ve ever changed a site from plain HTML to PHP, you’ll know why this action is useful. If you change a file extension manually, OS X gives you a warning every time, and there’s no way to turn it off—making a tedious process even worse. With this action you can select an entire folder and convert all the .html files to .php at once, with no warnings.

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