Life through a lens

Have you ever wondered how to resize your photos in a quick and easy way? Well, for those of you who own a Mac, this thing can be done quickly by a simple workflow with Automator. Here I'll write a sort of tutorial in which I'll explain how to resize and rename a picture or a group of them.
So, first, go to your Applications folder and open Automator. If you use Leopard, the window is this: you must choose the Ad Hoc option.

Now you'll get the main window: in the left column there are all the available actions and on the right there is an empty space where you'll put the selected actions by a simple drag-and-drop operation.

The first action you have to import is that of "Obtain Specified Elements in Finder": you find this in the Documents and Folders library: drag and drop this action into the left panel.

Then, you select the "Copy Finder Elements" action and import it on the right. Here you can specify where do you want to put your resized pictures. I've choosen the Desktop folder for clarity.

Then, go in the Preview library (if you use Tiger) or in Photo library (if you run Leopard) and import the Resize Pictures action. Here you can specify what will be the dimensions of the new picture and you can choose to specify it in percentage or in pixels of the longest side of the picture. I've choosen this second one and specified 800 pixels.
The next move is to rename the file, so import the dedicated action (found in the Finder library) and specify the way you want to rename the picture. I've choosen to add a short string at the end of the file name ("_B" in my case). So the final result should look like this:

At this point, save this workflow choosing "Save as Plugin for the Finder". Now, you are ready to resize you picture simple by right-clicking on a picture, choosing “Other”, than “Automator” and selecting the Resize option you have already created.
Simple, easy, quick: the power of Mac.

Note: all the figures here refer to the italian OS X 10.5 but I think that it's the same in other languages.