Doing small tasks over and over again can really bog down your productivity. How much time have we all spent renaming a huge number of files or resizing the pictures from our last holidays in order to be able to send them to grandma? Luckily for you, there is Action(s), your own personal automation assistant that will take care of whatever task you give it.

Action(s) is fantastic! It is a powerful and very easy to use tool that can do everything you can do with your computer, automatically. It can rename a large group of files; resize a batch of photos to fit onto your website; automatically backup your data; and millions of other things that can simplify your work or your everyday life.
The best thing about Action(s) is that you don't need to know a thing about programming to use it. You just drag and drop commands in the interface to create your own Workflows. In this video, we will show you how it works. Together, we will create a workflow to rename and resize our most recent batch of pictures for the web.

The first thing you need to do is launch Action(s). It is easy: simply click on the red launch button bellow:



Once the download is finished, Action(s) is ready to go. Remember that you can use Action(s) on both Mac and PC.

Once Action(s) is launched, the interface opens with a Library column on the left hand side of the window. The library is for selecting categories or other items to use in your workflows. In the middle, an action column contains the available actions. When you click on an action, its description and helpful tips appear at the bottom of the library panel. On the right side of the window, the workflow pane is the place where you drag actions to build your workflow.

actions

  1. The first step in our workflow will be to choose the pictures we want to resize. To do so, we will select the Images category in the Library column on the left. The actions related to image editing and management will appear in the action column. Choose Get Images and drag it into the workflow pane.
    An item now appears in the workflow pane. This item allows you to modify the settings of the Get Images action that you just added. For example, by clicking on the Add button, you can select the images you want the workflow to work with.

  2. As we don’t want the original pictures to be modified by the workflow, we will first ask Action(s) to copy the selected pictures into a specific folder. In the library column, locate the Files and Folders category, then choose the Copy Files action and drag it into the workflow.
    In the resulting workflow item, choose other… from the pop-up menu and select your destination folder.

  3. Next, we want to resize the pictures so that they are of a more appropriate size for the web and they don’t take hours to upload and download. This can be done with the Resize Images action from the Images category. We will add it to our workflow too. A 600 per 400 pixels size is exactly what we need.

  4. We are almost done. We have selected the files that Actions should work with; copied them into a destination directory; and resized them. But they still have this very unsexy name that the digital camera gave them and therefore our family and friends will not know when and where they were taken. Let’s rename them before we upload them to the web. In the Files and Folders category there is a Rename Files action that is just perfect for doing this.
    In the workflow item, let’s choose Make Sequential, and change all their names to “Resized pictures”. It’s just that easy.

  5. We are now ready to run our workflow. Click the Run button in the top-right hand corner of the window, and in a few seconds our workflow is processed and our pictures are ready, with their new name and their new size.


That’s what Action(s) can do! In a few simple steps you can realize advanced and powerful workflows that would have required hours of manual work. There are dozens of actions available that can do anything you can imagine… and more.

Visit http://app.jbbres.com/actions for more information about Action(s).