Photoshop automation and such

Ok, I have 0 expereance with applescripting and now I need to make a script! I’m totally clueless! I’m a visual type person, not much of a programmer…

So here is the deal, we’re changing to a new version of filemaker and so the boss has decided to totally change our day to day workflow in order to speed things up around here. He’s handling the filemaker stuff, but he wants me to handle the image batching side of things. To understand what I want I’ll decribe what goes on now and what the change will be…

Ok, so right now at the end of the day I run three batch processes. The first is Leaf Batch, which is set to take images shot durring the day move the origionals to a ‘RAW’ folder and create tiffs that are saved in a seperate ‘exported’ folder. Than once the first batch is done I run a batch action in photoshop that rezises once than saves as a jpg to an ‘email’ folder than resizes again and saves as a jpg to a ‘filemaker’ folder. Than I run a second batch that resizes the tiffs to 72dpi, and saves the image as a jpg to a folder that changes monthly (currently it’s called ‘Oct04’)

The next day someone elce e-mails all the images saved in the ‘e-mail’ folder to various art directors, and another person takes the ‘filemaker’ images and enters them into filemaker.

Here’s what we hope to do once the new filemaker is set up:
When an image is saved to an ‘IN’ folder Leaf batch will process the file immideately, saving the origional to the ‘RAW’ folder and a tiff to an ‘exported’ folder. The only change there is the fact that we will be processing as files are saved… Leaf Batch has this capability built in, so that’s taken care of.

But now as Leaf batch saves files into the ‘exported’ folder I want to create an applescript that automaticaly checks to make sure there aren’t any errors in the file name* than sends the file to Photoshop, where the image is resized and saved as a jpg into a folder that filemaker will use(after that the person dealing with programming filemaker will take over) After the file has been processed I want it to trash the tiff.

Also we may want to do other things with the batch, such as adding information to the ‘file’ info that filemaker can read to help it do some sorting if nessisary, also any exif information in the tiff file must stay intact through all the processing being done

*As for the file name errors, the file names we use here are an A followed by 7 digits an on occation there is a dash followed by a single letter at the end of the file. What I’ve noticed is that sometimes people have put a space before the A or typed the letter O instead of a zero in the file name.

Does that all make sense? farely straight forward I think, just having no expereance I don’t know quite where to start. I learn better by doing, but If anyone has a recomendation for a real good book for people like me please tell me, as I’ve always wanted to figure out applescript but until now had no reason to. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Just realized I should have added that while I do have PhotoshopCS here I only have one copy, that I use while this automatic batching will be going on so I’d prefer to set it up on it’s own machine using Photoshop 7 (I’d prefer not to have to buy another copy of CS, but if I have to than I will)