Automate New Folder Creations

As I’m in the process of developing my digital photography workflow for using Apple’s image management program, Aperture, I’m constantly looking for way to automate tasks to get my jobs done not only more quickly, but more importantly, more efficiently. 

As powerful as Apple’s Aperture program is for organizing digital files, you still have to export folders of files one at a time. There are some work a-rounds posted elsewhere on the net, but none met my particular needs as of yet. The ultimate feature would be for Aperture to convert and export specified folders (be they regular or smart folders) into a desired format, such JPEG, and then burn those same folders on a DVD or just copy them to an external drive. An automated feature like this would be great because if you have a large batch of say 10 or more folders of files to export, it could be done overnight or while you’re away from your computer, and you wouldn’t have to babysit the process.

Perhaps someone with AppleScript skills will be able to create a solution for this problem, for now here is my little way of automating part of the task.

When you have to export lots of folders from Aperture, you probably will want to create sub-folders in your finder to mirror the name of the folders you’re exporting. If you do this type of folder creation a lot as part of your job or projects, consider creating a Automator action that will create those sets of folders for you. It’s really simple to set up. Here’s how:

1. Open Automator and select the Finder actions in the left pane of Automator.

2. In the middle column, select New Folder and slide that into the larger workflow window.

3. Click on Where and select a destination for where you want each folder to go.

4. Now hold down the Option key on your Mac and at the same time click on the action you item and pull it down some. This should create a copy of that action. Keep doing this until you have the number of folders you think you will need to create.

5. Rename or give a name to each New Folder action based on your needs.

6. On the left top side of each New Folder Action, click on the little triangle next to the words Files/Folders. Select Ignore Results From Previous Actions. By doing this, you will not get folders within folders. Do this for each of the New Folder Actions.

7. Now click Run to make sure it works the way you want. 

8. Now go to File>Save-as-Plug-in and choose Script Menu from the drop-down of menu items. Give your workflow a name. This will save the workflow in your Script Menu folder. You could also save it as an application and run from the Dock. 

That’s it. It’s a little time saver. It saves you from having to manually create the same folders for each client job.