iView MediaPro Automator Actions
These Automator actions allow iView MediaPro catalogs and media items to be driven from Automator workflows. Using them, you can build Automator workflows that take a lot of the basic repetitive work out of managing media catalogs.These actions are a little old now (it's been nearly two years since I wrote them) but they still work with iView MediaPro 3. As I'm not planning to move my workflow to Microsoft Expression (which is what iView MediaPro has become), these probably won't see any more development work unless there's real demand.
New iView MediaPro Catalog
This action simply creates a new catalog in the specified location.
Save iView MediaPro Catalog
This does pretty much what you'd expect. It saves the specified catalog to disk. I was asked for this action by a few people but I'd advocate being very careful when using it. The last thing you want is a workflow that trashes something by mistake and then saves the catalog. Especially if you're not the sort of person to be particularly regular about backing up catalogs.
Get Specified iView MediaPro Catalog
This action returns either the specified catalog or the front catalog. This action is useful for providing input to the Save Catalog action or, via the supplied conversion action, for allowing all the items in a catalog to be specified as input to the next action.
Import Files To iView MediaPro Catalog
Not everyone wants to import files to an existing catalog. In the 1.1 release, you can specify that the action creates a new catalog to import the files into. You can now also set an option to check for duplicate files during the import. With this option set, if the action finds that a file is already in the catalog, it won't be imported. This is useful if you import over and over again from the same directory to pick up new additions. The duplicate check isn't particularly smart but it works for the majority of cases.
Get Selected iView MediaPro Items
This action returns a list of the items that are selected in the catalog specified. The change from the 1.0 release is that you can now specify either the front catalog or a specific catalog. This allows the action to be used for a variety of catalogs without requiring prompting.
Export Annotations For iView MediaPro Items
This action provides exactly the same function as the Sync Annotations menu item in iView MediaPro. When you use this action, the annotations for the list of input catalog items will be written back to the actual image files (into the resource fork). This is useful if you want to make sure that that applications such as Photoshop will see the up-to-date annotations.
Label iView MediaPro Items
This action is pretty straightforward. It sets the label color of for an input list of catalog items. Like the Set Annotations action, this action also provides the input list of catalog items as an output list to allow chaining.
Rebuild iView MediaPro Items
This action performs the rebuild operation for the media items supplied as an input. The only option is to allow the rotation of the thumbnails to be reset. This action is probably most useful for folks who want to change the thumbnails to a new size. Sadly, iView MediaPro doesn't allow the thumbnail size to be set via Applescript so you'll still have the set the size manually.
Set Annotations For iView MediaPro Items
In the 1.1 release, there's a new configuration panel called Options. It's not a fabulous name for the panel but it contains a couple of new controls.
There's an option now to set the product annotation field. This can be set from either the EXIF model information for an image file or to a manually entered string. This is useful if you want to use the product annotation to show the camera model used to take the image.
The other new setting is a little more involved. There’s an option now to control when the annotation fields are overwritten. The default mode is to always overwrite annotations for a media item. However, if you select the "only when existing annotation is empty" setting, the fields will only be overwritten if they're blank. This can be used for setting default information for annotations where no information is currently entered.
Set Keywords For iView MediaPro Items
This simple action allows keywords to be specified for the input media items. The keywords can be a comma separated list (to allow multiple keywords) and the usual append/replace option is present. In a future release, I hope to integrate the iView MediaPro keyword file information into the action.
Set People For iView MediaPro Items
This simple action is similar to the category and keyword actions and allows the people annotation to be specified for the input media items. The list of people can be comma separated and, once again, the usual append/replace option is present.
Set Categories For iView MediaPro Items
This action simply sets the category annotation for the supplied media items. The only option is whether to replace the current categories (if they exist) or append to them. If you want to set several category entries at a time, you can enter them as a comma separated list (e.g. category1, category2, category3).
Set Event Date For iView MediaPro Items
This action allows the IPTC event date annotation to be set. It can be set automatically from the EXIF date information in the file or from the date information available via the Finder. If neither of those options give the right date and time information then there's a manual option available too.
Set Orientation For iView MediaPro Items
This action sets the orientation of the image, which can be useful if your camera doesn't have a rotation sensor to tag the images with the correct rotational sense.
Copy Annotations For iView MediaPro Items
This action provides the core functionality of the MetaSync application. Each item in the input list is searched for in the specified catalog using the match criteria provided. When the matched item is found in the source catalog, the annotations from that item are then copied over. This is a useful action if you have two catalogs with linked images in them (such as a Raw catalog and a finished TIFF or Photoshop catalog) and want to keep the annotations in sync without entering the information again by hand.
iView MediaPro Automator Actions.dmg (Version 1.1b, 268K)