How To use Folder Actions in OS X to Convert or Rotate Images

Do you find yourself opening Photoshop or another image editor a lot on your Mac so that you can convert the filetype of an image or rotate it because a website that you’re trying to upload an image to doesn’t accept that filetype or because you post for a blog and they want you to use a specific filetype.

Well within Mac OS X there is a very cool useful feature that I use a lot for when converting images to decrease the file size, flipping images horizontal and vertical, rotating images left and right as well as many more AppleScripts that you can add.

The first thing to do is to create a folder, I usual create mine in My Documents and then drag the folder onto the Dock.

After you have created the folder right click on and hover your mouse over More and then press Enable Folder Actions.

When you’ve pressed Enable Folder Actions, right click on the folder again and once more move the mouse over More but this time press Attach a Folder Action.

A window will pop up asking you to choose a file when you click Attach a Folder action. For the default folder actions on Mac OS X navigate to /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts. Here you will find a list of 13 AppleScripts that will let you convert images, rotate them and flip them. You can also download AppleScripts and put them in this folder or write your own. Select the AppleScript you want, for this example i’ll be using Image - Duplicate as PNG.scpt. After you have attached an action if you press the folder again you’ll see that you can attach another action, edit a folder action or remove a folder action.

When you drag and drop an image onto the folder you’ll now see that two folders are created. One called Original Images and the other called PNG Images. The Original Images is the images that you have dragged onto the folder and the PNG Images folder are the images that have been converted.

I hope that you have found this tip useful and that it improves your workflow when working on your Mac and saves you a lot of time from having to open memory intensive image editors such as Photoshop to do a simple task such as rotating an image.

If you would like you would like to learn how to write AppleScripts in OS X then I recommend that you go here or have a search around Google. AppleScript is pretty easy to get to grips with and is basically English, so if you know English then you should pick it up pretty quickly.