I am not having great luck with Automator and the Auto Import script. Every time I set it up it works fine, but when I try it again on a job it does not work. I am using it for both tethered shooting in Aperture and when shooting with Camera Control Pro 2 (Nikon) for Live View. Two questions:
1) Does Automator have to be running in the background?
2) If Automator is running, do I have to load the action?
Thanks
Forgive me if I’m missing something obvious, but I’m not sure which Auto Import script you’re talking about. I wouldn’t mind taking a look at it and see if I can figure out why it doesn’t work on jobs.
1) No, the Automator app is just for creating workflows, it’s not needed for running them.
2) See 1.
Depending on what actions you want to perform, there may be a better option: Writing a script as stay-open application (which might check a folder for new images every second while the app is running). But like I said, the solution depends on your requirements.
Thanks for helping.
I go into Automator and in Folder Actions I select “Import Photos”.
It sets up an action that automatically imports RAW files to an Aperture project as soon as they arrive in a prescribed folder.
You said that once setup, Automator does not have to be open for the script to run. This makes me think now that I must be doing something wrong when I set it up on a job.
I have some time today so I will try a test run again to see it it will work. I will post my results. Again, thanks for your help.
mp
From my personal experience I find Folder Actions to be unreliable. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong, but I still prefer to write a stay-open AppleScript that does the work. Of course you need to manually start the script when you’re working and close it when you’re done.
All the script needs to do, is look in a predefined (or selected) folder and see if there are any files there. If so, import them in Aperture (optionally name the project, apply presets, manipulate metadata or whatever), then delete them (if you have a managed library, if yours is referenced, I would skip the delete part).
“From my personal experience I find Folder Actions to be unreliable.”
I think that may indeed be the problem. I just set it up again and I could not get it to work at all. Two days ago I started from scratch and it worked flawlessly in Camera Control Pro and Aperture tethering. This has become the routine. I just don’t get it so until I hear of something better, I will just forget it. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
mp
I searched ApertureExpert.com for this capability. The pointer to Automator was perfect. I created a Folder Action that now watches a folder and auto-imports the images into the Aperture library. I have been scanning film from my 1994 two-week honeymoon trip to Hawaii. I manually imported the first 290 or so images. Then it dawned on me that there should be a way to watch a folder and auto-import. As usual ApertureExpert.com had the answer.
Now I simply start Aperture, start the folder action, start VueScan (scanning software), and tell it to write the scan output files to the watched folder. After each image is scanned and saved they now are automatically imported into my Aperture library in the project of my choosing.
Thanks ApertureExpert.com!
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