2006-05-10

Automator Avoids Apps

My Mac mini let out a sigh of relief when I found this tip. Using a 1 step Automator action, you can build a simple photo viewer for your iPhoto library. This allows you to get at your photos, visually, and in the proper albums, without firing up iPhoto. It literally takes 1 minute to go build this app for yourself. TUAW has a picture of the resulting app if you'd like to see it.

Even with the speed-up in iPhoto 6, this "PhotoPanel" is much, much, faster and perfect if you just want to grab a photo or three for a quick task. I saved the Automator action as an application and dropped it in my dock between iPhoto and Photoshop Elements. Now I can drag a photo right out of the panel on to Elements for editing. That's how drag and drop is supposed to work! Sure, you can access the photos via the finder, but you don't get the context of the iPhoto albums so I see myself using this mini-app a lot.

1 comment:

Jason said...

That's pretty slick, basically a "QuickView" feature, something I think should be present for any standard file format.

There are times where you really don't need a big application, but just looking at the name of a file doesn't do much for you. Something small and to the point like this takes care of that.