How can Automator or Applescript rotate 500,000 images in folders and subfolders.

Question

Hi Everyone,
I have very specific question.
I've got 500,000 images that sit in 98 subfolders. Some of the subfolders contain 25,000 images.
Now my question: is there any script/automator workflow that I can use?
I was trying to create a workflow:
1. Ask for Finder Items
2. Get Folder Contents (tick repeat for each subfolder found)
3. Rotate images
It works OK, but only for these folders where there is less than 4,096 files:
I normally receive following error message:
'Rotate images failed - 1 error
too many arguments (12019) -- limit is 4096'
Is there any way to increase this limit or create completely different apple script?
I really hope that someone will help me with this one.
By the way my OS is Mountain Lion
Thank you

Answer 1

well, there are a couple of possibilities here:
system events is quitting (it will do that on its own after a few minutes of inactivity) and he script is getting confused when it has to restart
the file 00353391301.JPG is not a valid image file (corrupt data, or an unsupported file format with the wrong extension, or the wrong type of file entirely, or something like that).
so, covering the bases, try this revision:
set folderToProcess to choose folder with prompt "Choose a folder to process"
set folderPath to quoted form of POSIX path of folderToProcess
-- 13 is a spotlight constant for images that I can't find documented anywhere (I got it by saving a spotlight image search in the Finder and examining it in a text editor).  FYI.
set fileList to paragraphs of (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin " & folderPath & " '_kMDItemGroupId == 13'")
tell application "Image Events"
  -- tell image event not to quit itself
          set quit delay to 0
          repeat with thisImageFile in fileList
                    try
  -- open the image file
                              set openedFile to open thisImageFile
                              tell openedFile
  -- you didn't specify which way or how much you wanted to rotate.  this rotates them 90° clockwise
                                        rotate to angle 90
  -- save back to same file
                                        save
                              end tell
                    on error errstr
  -- image events had an error - dislpay alert, then skip this file
                              my displayError(thisImageFile, errstr)
                    end try
          end repeat
  -- reset Image Event's automatic quitting
          set quit delay to 900
end tell
on displayError(thisImageFile, errstr)
          tell application "System Events"
                    display alert "Image Events Error" message "file : " & thisImageFile & return & return & "error: " & errstr
          end tell
          set imageAlias to POSIX file thisImageFile
          tell application "Finder"
                    set label index of item imageAlias to 1
          end tell
end displayError
This makes three changes - it tells Image Events not to quit itself during script execution, it expands the error handling block to cover all the Image Events functions (this will report more detail and not interrupt further processing), and as a convenience labels any problematic file orange in the finder so it's easier to find. 
Also, I should point out that adayzdone and ludwip are presenting orthogonal approaches (one that finds files using the unix 'find' utility rather than mdfind, and one that's entirely unix-based using the underlying sips utility).  Treat each approach as its own thing; don't get confused and try to implement parts of each of them. People on this forum sometimes forget how confusing help can be when helpers are working off of different models and fail to thoroughly contextualize their posts.