[Music]
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister
and welcome to another ScreenCastsOnline
weekly tip video.
You're probably already familiar with the built-in
context sensitive menu within the Finder.
If I select a file I can control or right click
and get this menu here.
I can rename files, duplicate them, share them.
I can't actually resize them though.
That's not built into the Mac even under
the services there's no resize or scale options.
I could bring this into preview
and resize it there and save it.
But one of the reasons why the Mac
is such a workhorse is due to the amount
of customization and automation
that could be so easily implemented.
One of the unsung heroes of Mac automation
is Automator which allows you to create
either simple or extremely complex automation actions
using drag and drop.
Now to demonstrate I'm going to create
a new service on my Mac that allows me
to rescale images in the Finder.
Let's go ahead and open Automator.
I'll say file, new.
I'm gonna create a new service.
This will allow me to access the action
I'm going to create from that popup menu
in the Finder.
I'm gonna go ahead and say choose
and over here we have options
to configure the actions.
The first thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to change the service receive selected text
and change that to image files.
Then specifically in the Finder.
Now over here, these all are various actions
that are built in to Automator.
I'm gonna look for one which has
to do with scaling images.
If I just type scale you'll see here
we have an option in the preview.
These are all preview actions.
We can use these externally from preview.
Preview just acts as the engine
to perform these various actions.
Scale images is the one I want.
I can read down here what it actually does.
If I drag this across to here.
Now because this action will actually change
the image files passed to it, it's giving
me the option to duplicate the file
so I have an original and one that's
been acted upon.
But for simplicity I'll say don't
add that duplicate action.
Right, so what I can do now is
I can either rescale the images
to a specific size or a percentage.
If I say percentage and say 25%.
If I just over type that with 25 that's now done.
There are ways to test this within Automator
but I'm fairly confident that has worked fine.
I'm gonna save this, file save.
I'm gonna save this as scale to 25%.
I'm gonna say save.
Close that down.
All right we'll go back here to the Finder.
This particular image is 4,608 pixels,
that's going to be wide.
If I control or right click the image,
go down to services, we should see,
there we go, scale to 25%, select that,
we see a little cog working up in the menu bar,
went very quickly.
But now you'll see we've got this little cloud icon here
showing me that that is now uploading to iCloud.
This hasn't changed.
But if I just go to another image,
then click back on that image,
yeah we can see now that the dimensions
are now 1,152 wide whereas before they were 4,400 et cetera.
I can do this to multiple files as well.
Let's say these last three files here.
If select those, control or right click,
go to services, scale to 25%.
It will actually regenerate those files
and again you can see it's a quick action.
It's disappeared, but there's a cog up here
showing me that the action is working
and they're now being reuploaded to iCloud
because this is in the My Documents folder
under iCloud Drve.