When you’re in the web business there are a lot of repetitive tasks, such as making image thumbnails, updating website code, or adding images to a blog post. You will do a better business if you can automate these tasks as much as possible. For me, creating automated methods is also more fun. I quickly get bored with repetitive tasks. I write WordPress plugins and shell scripts, use subversion, and I definitely use OS X Automator.

Automator is an application on the Mac that helps you build scripts out of a set of common actions. These actions include renaming files, resizing images, creating folders, copying files and about a million other tasks. At first glance Automator looks as if it might be somewhat limited, because like most things on a Mac, it’s very simple. But it can save you a lot of time. Once you get good at it, you can even build scripts on the fly for a single use and still save time over doing it manually.

Here’s a hint. To become super productive with Automator, use variables in your Automator scripts. Variables are incorporated into Automator in a very subtle way, but they are very powerful.

Action: Set Value of Variable

As each Automator action occurs it can add one or more variables to the Automator results. You can see the results at the end of each action after running your script by click on the results tab of the action. To place the results of an action in a variable, add the Set Value of Variable action after it. For instance if you ask the user to select a file, or if you create a directory, and you’re going to need to access that value more than once in your script, place it in variable.

Action: Get Value of Variable

When you need to get a value of a variable previously set by the Set Value of Variable action, use the Get Value of Variable action.

Menu Item: Action > Ignore Input

Selecting this menu item will tell the currently selected action to ignore the results of the previous action, basically clearing the results. Every action will try to act on all the current results, and results accumulate. So if your action performs multiple tasks you will most likely need to clear the results at one or more points in your script. In many ways, setting this on an action is like starting a new Automator script in the current script, except that variables are still available.

For example, if you resize an image, the resized image will be stored in the results. If you want to do something else to the original image, you need to have an action that ignores input or else it will act on the resized image as well.