Filed under: Computing | Tags: automator, email, image attachment, image resize, mac os x, outlook 2011, service
We often want to send an email, but with ever increasing megapixels not necessarily the 10-18 megapixel original version that is the common place for digital cameras of today. Such was the case today for me, wanting to send my Dad some of the pics that I’d processed for his wedding on Monday, but not wanting to send the originals (I’ll be doing that on a CD). So I spent this morning preparing an Automator Service on Mac OS X 10.7 that would automatically resize them down to 1024 pixels and attach to an new Outlook 2011 email message for me. The Service is available from the Apple menu, or by right-clicking after selecting the chosen images and selecting Email (Outlook) scaled image.
The Service then:
- Creates a temporary folder on the Desktop named “automator”
- Duplicates the images files to inside this folder and resizes to 1024 pixels
- Creates a new image and attaches those images
- Deletes the temporary files and folder
Hopefully other Mac OS X users will find my little Service useful. Download here. (.zip archive)
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was so great to find this online – downloaded it – worked once – and now it no longer works: tells me NEW FOLDER ENCOUNTERED AN ERROR?
Comment by Jan Lill January 23, 2012 @ 4:11 amrestarted computer – no joy
reloaded – still has same error message
any suggestions?
That is indeed strange, I’ve used it multiple times without fault. Did it install to your USERNAME/Library/Services folder?
You could try recreating this within Automator yourself, thereby customising it to your own preferences too. My steps for making this were:
- Create a folder on the desktop called automator. We need this for a step later on.
- Open Automator and create a new Service called Email (Outlook) scaled image
- The service is to receive files and folders from any application (drop boxes at the top)
- Drag the NEW FOLDER action over the right-hand pane. Specify the name automator and location as Desktop
- Drag the GET SELECTED FINDER ITEMS action over the right-hand pane.
- Drag the SCALE IMAGES action over the right-hand pane. This will ask to add an additional COPY FINDER ITEMS action, do this.
- Within the SCALE IMAGES action enter a pixel value to scale the image down to or change the drop box to scale the image by a percentage value.
- Drag the CREATE NEW OUTLOOK MAIL MESSAGE action over the right-hand pane. You can specify default values for your email here or just leave blank.
- Drag the ADD ATTACHMENTS TO OUTLOOK MESSAGE action over the right-hand pane.
- Drag the GET SPECIFIED FINDER ITEMS action over the right-hand pane. Click the ADD button within this action and add the automator folder we created in step one.
- Drag the MOVE FINDER ITEMS TO TRASH action over the right-hand pane.
- Delete the automator folder from the desktop
Comment by g04uld January 23, 2012 @ 6:16 am