"Ask for Finder Items" Automator action broken?

OK, I'm pulling my hair out on Automator (again). I'm on OS X Lion 10.7.1.
Here's what I want to do: I have image files named "something-something (S1).png" and I want to create a copy of each file named "something-something (S2).png" then resize that copy to 50% the size of the original. A perfect choice for Automator, I would have thought.
So here's the workflow I came up with:
1. Ask for Finder Items: Type set to Files and Allow Multiple Selection checked.
2. Duplicate Finder Items: To create a copy, hopefully named "something-something (S1) copy.png".
3. Rename Finder Items: Set to Replace Text, with Find set to "(S1) copy" and Replace set to "(S2)" (in basename only).
4. Scale Images: Set to By Percentage 50.
I would have thought that would have worked. Trouble is, it doesnt even get to first base. When I run the workflow I see the expected choose file dialog, and I choose a test PNG file. Then Automator happily announces that "Ask for Finder Items completed" in the log, and proceeds to sit .. and sit ... and sit. It says it's running, but nothing is happening. No duplicate file action happens, no rename .. nothing. Oh, and yes, I do see the selected filename in the "Results" area for the Ask for Finder Items action.
What's going on? Any ideas? For a supposedly intuitive tool I find automator inscrutable (and I'm a 30 year seasoned operating system oftware developer).
TIA,
--Tim

FWIW, if you've found a bug, please contact Apple Support folks or (if you have access) use the BugReport tool.
(This is a user forum, and the Apple Engineering folks may or may not see any reports that are posted here.)

Similar Messages

"Run Workflow" action in Automator does not "Ask for Finder Items"

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Never tired Run Workflow before so as as a test I rn these two
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Hi,
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Found this approach which is working for me:
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Let me begin by saying that I've done the SAME THING for a long time with this Automator script, and it's worked flawlessly. I recently added some now automator actions (and later deleted them) thinking they were the culprit of why my "filter finder items" was showing no results, but I'm not sure at all at this point.
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It's long, so bear with me (I use this script to install custom Sims2 content when I download it:
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Get folder contents
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To clarify, it's recently been simply deleting the MTS folders and creating a "Recent" folder and archiving it but it's empty. So the script is not filtering for the Sims2Pack data nor the .package data as it used to.
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Thanks.
iMac Intel Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Here is an update to the script, however filter continue to not work as it once did.
New Folder: Recent (in my downloads folder)
Get Specified Folder: my downloads folder
Get folder contents (repeat for each subfolder found)
Filter finder items (name contains .package)
Copy Finder items (to Recent)
Get Specified Folder: my downloads folder
Get folder contents (repeat for each subfolder found)
Filter finder items (name contains Sims2Pack)
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Get folder contents (repeat for each subfolder found)
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Copy finder items (to Recent)
Get Specified Folder: Recent
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Rename (add date to end of file name)
Rename (add time to end of file name)
Get Specified Folder: Recent
Move to trash
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Get folder contents (repeat for each subfolder found)
Filter finder items (name contains .package)
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Get Specified Folder: my downloads folder
Get folder contents
Filter finder items (name contains Sims2Pack)
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Get folder contents (repeat for each subfolder found)
Filter finder items (name contains MTS (most of the containing download folders (after they've been expanded by another automator script, have this at the beginning of the folder name due to where I commonly download my custom content)
Move to trash
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Automator action broken

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Hi, I am looking for either an automator action/workflow or applescript that will locate a hyperlink by finding text within a webpage and click on that link. I need this because the url is constantly changing. Thanks for any assistance.

Thank you in advance!

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// Display the text in an alert with an OK button
app.alert(msg, 3);
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IPhoto Automator actions = broken and useless

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Paul:
You might post your question in the Automator forum. There's probably more Automator users there that can help.
G4 DP-1G, 1G RAM, 22 Display, 2-80G HD, QT 7.0.3P Mac OS X (10.4.3) Canon S400, i850 & LIDE 50, Epson R200, 2G Nano

Help! where to find universal automator actions?

I've been playing around with Automator lately and suddenly crashed into an error after downloading a new action (create new mail message) from: http://automator.us/
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My mac is running Snow Leopard (hence posting here) and it's 32 bit only. I can't upgrade to Lion, so even if any are in the app store that doesn't help much. For those of us that are unable (or unwilling) to upgrade, I find removing all download links except to the app store a very bad decision in the customer service department. I used to be able to find such things there.

It depends on the developer. A lot of the actions are on smaller sites or are not regularly updated, and the early versions on your referenced site were written for 10.4 Tiger. There is already a New Mail Message action included in the default Automator installation, but actions can still be found at the bigger download sites such as cnet or macupdate - actions at http://www.automatedworkflows.com/ are also well maintained.

Automator Filter Finder Items

A very simple task, which I have attempted to figure out many times over the last few months; but my repeated attempts haven't been successful. This should be easy for someone to resolve…
I would like to strip out all the files of a certain extension (.txt) from an hierarchy of nested folders, & move them to the Trash. (Told you it was easy!)
Here's what I think ought to work:
• Create an Automator Workflow
• 'Ask for Finder Items' to select the topmost folder
• 'Get Folder Contents' with 'Repeat for each subfolder found' — (the results successfully include all the relevant files)
• 'Filter Finder Items': "find files where any of the following are true: file extension is .txt" — (I tried "txt" as well as ".txt")
• 'Move Finder Items to Trash'.
The files turn up (alongside loads of other junk) in the 'Get Folder Contents' step, & they are reported in the results; but when I try to filter out everything apart from the .txt files, so that only the .txt files remain, the filter reports no results.
So the 'Filter Finder Items' action completes with no results, & with a warning that: The action “Move Finder Items to Trash” was not supplied with the required data.
I think it must be something obvious, but I can't figure it out, & although I've searched extensively online, everyone else with similar problems has other complications which get resolved… so they lose interest just at the point where I think they're going to reveal the solution.

You need to understand the issues here. Automator was released with 10.4 (Tiger), and many of the core automator actions date from that time. This introduces forward-compatability problems: things that should work (and maybe did work) in 10.4 might not work as specified in 10.6, depending on if/how the underlying cocoa APIs have changed. Now, in the best of all possible worlds, Apple would update automator actions with each new upgrade, but it's probably not needed for the bulk of the actions, and Apple may not be aware of problems that do exist with given actions (that depends on whether people filed meaningful bug reports on them).
Don't be confused by the seeming simplicity of what I did: the Move Finder Items to Trash action probably uses cocoa file system APIs directly, whereas my applescript leverages the developed programmatic underpinnings of the Finder - the Finder has a built-in system for moving files in bulk, whereas the action is obviously moving files one at a time (which is where things are getting congested).
Filter Finder Items seems to be a simple metadata search (just another use of the spotlight framework, which hasn't changed much since its inception) so I can't see any way in which it would fail. it is, of course, limited by the same things that spotlight is limited by - it won't find material that's not indexed and may not do exactly what one always expects (e.g., may not recognize an extension as an extension unless the extension belongs to an app registered with the system) but other than that there's very little it can do wrong. As a general rule, actions that deal only with manipulating automator data (e.g. modifying references passed from one action to the next) won't break. You'll only see breakage with actions that need to access exterior frameworks that have changed significantly since the actions were created.
That's the best answer you're going to get: one can't prove a negative, so there's no way to demonstrate that FFI isn't broken. it's easy enough to check for a given task, though - just run the workflow you have on a test folder without the deleting action, check the results window, and compare it to the results you expect (which you can gather by eye in a Finder search window, through an applescript, through an app that will report the number of files of given types in a folder…).

Copying Finder items into same folder as Action

I want an Action that can copy Finder items directly into the same folder the Action resides in, i.e. without specifying where or asking the user where.
Is this possible? All I've been able to create so far is an Action whereby I need to specify the folder or get the user to specify it.

OK, I am now going to try to teach you to fish
It might be a little bit easier to visualize if you think of the values passed along in your workflow as a stack of playing cards. Some actions do something with the cards and then just pass them on, some take all of the cards, and others add cards to the stack. The Set Value of Variable action takes the current stack of cards (the results of any previous action(s)), assigns it to a variable that is named whatever you want to name it, and passes the stack on to the next action. The Get Value of Variable gets the value of one of your previously named variables and adds it to the stack. You can also use a previously named variable in input fields of various actions, such as locations to copy to. I'm not sure why you are getting the path to the desktop (unless that is where your workflow application is located), but here are some additional comments for my previously posted workflow:
1) Run Applescript (with the Applescript posted earlier)
- if your workflow has been saved as an application, the results of this action will be a path to the folder that it is in (if not, the path will be to where the Automator application is, which isn't what you want)
2) Set Value of Variable
- this action will take that path, assign it to a variable with your specified name, and pass it on
3) New Folder
- this action makes a folder with the specified name in the specified location - you can drag variables into these fields, in which case their current values are what will be used
- the result of this action is a new folder, and the path to the folder is added to the current stack of cards (if any) and passed on to the next action
- since we just want the path to the new folder (and none of the previous cards), first we throw away any cards we may have (with the "ignore input" option) so that our results don't get mixed up.
4) Set Value of Variable
- same as (2) above, except that the value is now the path to the folder that got made in the previous action (3)
5) Ask for Finder Items (Type: files, Allow Multiple Selection)
- the results of this action will be whatever items you selected, and of course, they will be added to our current stack of cards unless we throw them away first with the "ignore input" option
6) Copy Finder Items
- this will copy Finder items (the ones we selected in the previous action) to the location that is specified - you can drag a variable into the To: field, in which case it's current value is what will be used.
- the result of this action will be the paths to the items that were just copied, but since this is the end of the workflow it doesn't matter
You can use the View Results action to see what the current stack of cards is, so you can see if what is going in and coming out of your actions is what you expect, and tweak accordingly.

"Filter Finder Items" not working properly

I'm taking my first crack at Automator, and while I've made good progress, one of the built-in actions, "Filter Finder Items", is just not behaving predictably. Basically, I'm doing the following:
1) Get selected finder items - pulls a selected folder
2) Set variable - this gives me a variable for the name of the folder we're working with
3) Create a new folder inside the selected folder
4) Get folder contents of selected folder
5) Filter for three different file extensions - here's where my problem starts
6) Move the filtered files into the new subfolder (though it really seems to be copying, which necessitates the following steps to get rid of the original files)
7) Get contents of selected folder again
8) Filter on the same three files extensions - this time it works properly
9) Move filtered files to Trash
For some reason, the first filter action doesn't seem to be working at all - if I have 15 files in the selected folder, but only three that match the filter, all 15 will be copied to the new subfolder. The second folder action will then, inexplicably, work exactly as it should and move the proper files to the Trash.
Does anybody know why this action doesn't want to cooperate? Has anybody else seen something similar?
Thanks for any hints/help.
Rick
Message was edited by: rnb2

Saving the workflow as an application should be all that is needed, but the first action (the one that gets the items to work with) may not be correct for your usage. If the first action is *Get Selected Finder Items*, unfortunately the selection would be the application itself, since that is what was most recently selected.
In this case, the application can be dragged onto the Finder's toolbar (where it will work with the current selection), otherwise the first action can be removed and the application used as a droplet (items dropped onto the application are passed to the workflow) or a Finder plugin.
The first action can also be replaced with an *Ask for Finder Items* action (ignoring input).

"Ask for Finder Items" Automator action broken?

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