Lazyweb: Help me learn Applescript
Can anybody recommend a good Applescript reference? I’ve got some ugly jobs that I want to automate, which seems like a good opportunity to pick up a new tool. Here’s what I want to do:
I’m moving my photos from Picasa — which I love dearly and will miss, but I never use my Windows PC any more, so it seems sort of daft to keep my photos there — to iPhoto. Picasa has a really cool “export” feature that can dump all of your photos out to disk in directories named after the albums you’ve created. I want to import all of these in to iPhoto, preserving the album names from Picasa. Seems pretty straightforward, no?
Anyway, pointers to good web Applescript references or even book recommendations would be appreciated. Alternately, if there’s an easy way to automate this sort of thing in other tools — Python in particular — that’d almost be better. (Although learning a new tool may or may not be the larger objective here.)
December 21st, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Well, if you you use the Picasa web exporter, you can use the “just XML” output and dump your images full size. Then you can process the XML with a Python script.
You can get more elaborate: look in the Picasa program files directory and you’ll find the XML export template. You can hack a copy of that and turn it into an “export a python script” template. There’s a .doc file somewhere in there that I wrote that describes how the templating system works.
You might also snoop around with the OLE/COM Object Viewer and look at this:
[ uuid(B32DDB80-8AE9-4AFB-8217-3955440F88C2), version(1.0), helpstring(”HelloCom 1.0 Type Library”) ]
December 21st, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Well right. That part is easy enough. It’s getting the images/libraries in to iPhoto that I’m not 100% sure how to do.
Oh, also, because I’m cooler than cool: I deleted the handy XML description of everything that Picasa was so kind as to provide to me. Good times!