Hot on the heels of last weeks post about Keyboard Maestro, I’ve also been experimenting with another app called Hazel to automatically tidy up certain files based on pre-programmed choices. In itself, having an app automatically file things out of my Downloads folder to somewhere more appropriate, based on file type and source for example, saves me doing it manually (or not bothering….) but following on that I’ve also found it really useful when preparing blog posts.

One of the constant pains for me, a non-designer, has always been preparing media for my blog posts, be it images of what I’m discussing, or links to apps I recommend. In the past it’s been a bit of a manual task, which for takes too long and consequently I don’t push posts out as often as I’d like because of it. But now I’ve found a way of using Hazel, and Automator workflows to create the images for me to push straight into my blogposts.

For those that don’t know, Automator is a program that comes with every Mac that allows you to create little workflow apps using drag-and-drop to create recipes for automated processes. There’s a huge amount of things you can do with it, but I’ll come back to what I’m doing with it in this case a bit later in to this post.

The problem I had is when I need an image in a blogpost, invariably I’ll acquire an image from somewhere (my own Lightroom catalog, or a stock photography site perhaps) that will be in a different size to what I need in the blog (typically 150×150 pixels). Previously, for every image I uploaded I had to prepare a smaller version manually by scaling it in one […]