New and Improved: Finder Emailing

Murphy posted about emailing from Finder a while back. This new screencast was entered in the Macinstruct tutorial contest, winner to be announced next week.

Just drag a file to a folder and it flies off to a pre-determined email address. Optionally, have the action prompt you for a subject so you can find it later.

Murphy finds this technique extremely useful for quickly backing up important files to a dummy Gmail account - especially with the new 20MB attachment size. You have files you can’t bring yourself to delete? Drag them to the folder and they’re on their way to a mail server, just in case you want them later. No addressing, no need to click send. It’s just sent. Murphy knows you can drag files to the Mail icon in the Dock. This is more direct - no extra clicks!

If you’ve got multiple assistants you send files to all the time you could create a folder for each. Dragging a file to their folder is like dragging it to their inbox.

The new screencast details both a Folder Action and an Automator solution. They achieve the same thing in terms of sending. The difference is that the Automator method leaves the file in its original location on your disk, which might be more convenient. But the Folder Action method can be utilized from an SSH session. That opens up a lot of possibilities and offers extra convenience.

The Automator solution comes from a post on TUAW that was inspired by a post on MacOSXHints that was submitted by Murphy. How’s that for a chain of events?

Visit the previous post to download the AppleScripts used in the screencast.

iPhoto Review Tool : Automator

iPhoto has a lot of stuff packed inside. Book makers, slideshows, greeting cards, special effects - it’s easy to get distracted when you’re trying to clean house and delete some photos. That’s where Automator comes in.

Just add three actions to a workflow - you’ll find them all under iPhoto in Automator:

1. Ask for Photos
2. Review Photos
3. New iPhoto Album

You’ll probably want the last one to prompt you for a name, so check the option to “Show Action When Run”.

Save the workflow as an application. When you run it you’ll see the same mini-browser we saw in a post last week. But you’ll also get a handy panel asking you to approve or reject each image. Make your choices, and an album will fill with your rejects. You could reverse the process and have Automator do something with the Approved images, like adding them to a Finder folder.

Confused? See it all in a screencast.

Once you’ve isolated your rejects in an album you can remove the files from your disk. Here’s more information on deleting from iPhoto.

iPhoto Mini Browser

Using a single Automator action you can pop open a mini iPhoto browser that lists your library, albums and images. You get quick access to your photos without fully opening iPhoto.

The action is designed to kick off workflows, letting you select the photos other actions will act upon. So the Workflow is active while the window is open.
You could add other actions to the Workflow, but you don’t have to. It was demonstrated on an episode of MacBreak Weekly with a second action to open the selected photos in Preview if you clicked Choose instead of Cancel.

You can open the browser a number of ways. To make it highly accessible you might want to assign a function key to it. You can do that with Xkeys, a freeware application Murphy uses in the screencast.

While playing with Automator you might notice an iPhoto action for reviewing photos. It facilitates simply accepting or rejecting photos, and passing them on to another action. You could dump all the rejects to an album for example. Sure, you could do this in iPhoto with other tools. But this action keeps you on task if you’re easily distracted! Maybe we’ll screencast that another day.

Snag Multiple Images from a Web Site

This screencast features Automator, but it’s more about how to achieve the goal than about using Automator.

Murphy will show you the basics of creating a Workflow, but the ins and outs of saving your Automator work as an application will have to wait. We’ll get to it soon.

This technique can be really useful when you want to grab some photos from an online gallery. Unfortunately, it won’t work with photo galleries created with more sophisticated tools. Many galleries rely on scripts and applets that this Workflow won’t handle.

Sleep Your Mac by Email

Murphy picked this tip up from Tim Margh last year and has been using it ever since. The Snippet shows how to configure your Mac to watch for emails matching certain criteria, like a particular subject. When the message comes in your Mac goes off to sleepyland. You could use this technique to have your Mac do other things as well. Perhaps more interesting things.

Some people will say this is stupid, you can simply set your Mac to sleep after x minutes. First of all, that’s no fun. Second, some people don’t want their Mac going to sleep on a timer. Ever.

On occasion Murphy wakes his Mac up remotely and connects with VNC. Sometimes he disconnects without putting the machine back to sleep. Instead of logging back in he just fires off a magic email.

You’ll need to download one file to try this yourself, straight from Apple’s site. It’s a sleeper action for Automator. Run the installer that comes in the dmg. The rest is all built-in.

So click Watch Now to view the screencast as Murphy acts out Tim’s tip. By the way, he uses text messages to sleep his Mac!
ps: Your Mac needs to be turned on, and Mail needs to be running.

Update: What about Windows? You can easily reboot Windows by email. Watch this to see how.

Note: Some readers have pointed out that you can do this whole thing in AppleScript. That’s true. But by using both Automator and AppleScript we’ve shown that you can kick off anything those two technologies can do - by email. Or text message for that matter.

Click for more ways to control your Mac by email.