Automator - A critique
Since there are a number of gushing reflections about Automator on the web I felt a reality check is needed. Don’t get my wrong I think Automator is a useful addition to Mac OS X but it also has a serious limitation that hamper its functionality.
There is no flow control.
What does this mean?
Well there are two main areas. The first is that you cannot make decisions about which action should get which files in any one workflow. For example, You cannot set up a workflow that could do the following:
If you have a folder full of images, lets say some of the images use the cmyk color space and others use the rgb color space. Lets say you want the cmyk images to be given to an action that will prepare the images for a brochure, and to give the rgb images to an action that will prepare the images before uploading to a website. You can’t do this. You cannot split the workflow so that some image files are given to one action, while other images go to another. (You could write two workflows, where each workflow ignores the files it shouldn’t be dealing with and then run both workflows over the same set of files)
The second main area and to me is even more important is the lack of looping over a number of Actions.
Lets take Ben Waldie’s Photoshop Actions as an example. His actions will either work on references to photoshop documents or the image files, and each action has the option of save and close. What he is trying to do here is get around one of the major weaknesses of Automator.
If you created an Automator workflow that scaled images, applied unsharp mask and then applied a brightness and contrast filter to each image all using photoshop. You would build the workflow by having a scale action, followed by a unsharp mask action, followed by a brightness and contrast action. You can then configure these actions to either save and close the file after each one, and the next action has to then open the file, or you can pass the photoshop document reference to the next action. Neither is a good solution, why?
If you save and close after each action is finished then the workflow is slowed down by each action having to open, do its thing then save and close the document. This is a significant hit on performance.
OK you say I wont save and close after each action is finished except for the last Photoshop action in the workflow. Think about this, Automator is about automated processing. Dealing with large number of files should not be a problem. If you don’t close those photoshop documents what happens when you dump a few thousand image files on your workflow. The first photoshop action in your workflow will attempt to leave a few thousand photoshop documents open. I think even the most maxed out Mac will grind to a halt as it runs out of memory when photoshop tries to deal with all these open documents.
Kevin