Automator loves to do the tedious tasks you prefer not to.
Automator is that little guy that just loves to do the tedious tasks you rather would like to skip. No, I am not talking about a person it is software.
The application comes with a library of many Actions (file renaming, finding linked images, creating a new mail message, etc.), all of which act as individual steps in a Workflow document. A Workflow document then can be used to carry out repetitive tasks. You can also save these Workflows so that it can be used over and over again, whenever it is needed. Unix command line scripts and AppleScripts can also be invoked as Actions. The actions are linked together in a Workflow. The Workflow can be saved as an application, Workflow file or a contextual menu item. This can also be called automator scripts.
There are many uses for this Application. You can for example right click a file and upload it to a FTP site while it copies the URL into your clipboard so you can paste it right away wherever you want. This is just an example of what you can do. It is smart to research it so you can use it to its full potential.
This little robot is pretty underrated and more should make use of its abilities. You can find useful scripts at the main Apple site here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/.
Some of these include change the file extension of selected files in one go. Maybe you want to convert a selection of filenames to a web-friendly format? Or maybe you want to take a text document and convert it into speech in a audio file? As you probably understand there is a lot of things you can do and you should check it out. You might just find something you didn't think you needed.
To be honest I haven't used the Application so much myself. I should really try to use it more for repetitive tasks...
And this is a picture of the application.
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