Brain-dead Newbie here...

Question

I would like to create a tool that will drag an image from a webpage to a folder every 20 seconds- for 15 minutes- every afternoon.
I do that by hand now- the images are from a webcam set up watching a nest of barn owlets growing up and eventually fly off. (I'm making a time lapse animation) Last night I got the big idea to automate the image gathering aspect; hours later I was more lost than when I started!
I don't know WHERE to start- the documentation for Automator isn't "newbie simple" for me. I couldn't even figure how to turn the example workflows on! I can deal with Photoshop actions, fancy wired sprites in skinned Quicktime movies, and webby javascript things- but I'm in diapers as far as Automator's process for building a tool is concerned. I'd be thrilled to find a tutorial that makes sense! Any suggestions? Thanks ahead of time.

Answer 1

It's very much task oriented (type of action) and not detailed oriented (how to do action). It takes practice, but letting go of how we are doing it and just identifying the action for the computer to do (however it wants to accomplish that action) really helps when creating Automator workflows. Changing the view of Automator actions to "Category" (instead of "Application") can help when using this approach. On the other hand, I'm sure some would say it's not that at all, that it's instead just a different way of thinking. Oh well, who knows.
Anyways, it sounds like this is what you want, in a somewhat task oriented approach:
1. starting from a web page (not how it's viewed, just start with web page or its URL)
2. get an image (not how to get it, just do it)
3. wait 20 seconds
4. start back over, but stop after 15 minutes
Here is a basic workflow for when you have a constant URL for the web page, but not a constant URL for the image.
1. "Get Specified URLs" (Internet category, or Safari app)
Easiest way to set this is have the page open in Safari and then use the "Current Safari Page" button in this action.
2. "Get Image URLs from Webpage" (Internet category, or Safari app)
In the previous action (step 1), we provided a URL of the webpage with the image we want. This action gets all image URLs from that webpage, but not the images themselves. (Note that we could set this to get any links on the page that lead to images, but that doesn't apply to our needs if the image is already on this page.) You can click on the "Results" button at the bottom of this action to view the URLs obtained when you run the workflow. In fact, go ahead and run the workflow before adding more actions so you can find out URL of the image you want.
3. "Filter URLs" (Internet category, or Safari app)
We probably don't want every image URL found by the previous action in step 2. It's likely we only want one image. You'll set the conditions for isolating that one image from those found in step 2. The easiest criteria is selecting "name" and then "begins with" or "contains", depending on what will match the name (after the last / in the URL) of the desired image but not the other images. This helpful for when the name of the image changes, perhaps because the date and time might be part of the name.
4. "Download URLs" (Internet category, or Safari app)
This is the second part of getting the images. As the name implies, this will download the files pointed to by the URLs. In our case, there should be only one URL that will be downloaded and it'll be an image.
5. "Pause" (Utilities category, or Automator app)
The description of this action doesn't tell you this, but if you try to set the pause to greater than 59 seconds (and press Return) then it'll give you a cryptic error message. You want every 20 seconds, so that shouldn't be a problem.
6. "Loop" (Utilities category, or Automator app)
This will start the workflow over again. Set it to "Loop Automatically" and then either choose the number of times (thrice per minute for 15 minutes is 45 times) or set it for 15 minutes. I would go with the number of times since the workflow likely won't run exactly three times per minute, because it takes time to go through each action. Try a few times (three or four) or a short number of minutes (like one or two) when first testing it out to make sure it's doing what you expect. Also, make sure it's set to "Use the original input" and not the results, because the results aren't URLs and this workflow needs to start with just our specified URL in the first action.
That's it.
Of course, if you discover that the image has the exact same name each time (i.e. the URL to the image doesn't change), then you can shorten the workflow. Essentially, you would start with the URL to the image as the specified URL instead of the webpage. In that case, you obviously wouldn't need "Get Images URLs from Webpage" since the URL is to an image and not a webpage. You also wouldn't need to filter the URLs because there would be only one specified. So, just specify URL, download URL, pause, loop. An easy way to specify the image URL in "Get Specified URLs" is to use its "Current Safari Page" button after opening the image in a new Safari window (just right-click on the image and choose "Open Image in New Window").
However you do it, you'll probably want to save this as an application instead of a workflow so you can run it instantly by double-clicking it, or put it in your Dock. You can edit it again by opening it from within Automator, or drag-n-drop the app onto Automator.