MacOS – Automator workflow runs forever

automatormacos

I have run into a problem with automator: I have a workflow that does image processing (it converts color images to gray). I am able to invoke the workflow from the terminal and it works fine. The command is:
automator -i infile.jpg imageconversion.workflow

However, I am facing a problem when I try to integrate this workflow in a webapp, build in Django and deployed with mod_wsgi on Apache. The workflow gets invoked (I can see this from the webapp logs), but it runs forever, and eventually apache will kill the child process after several minutes.

I am running OS X 10.9

Has anybody encountered a similar issue?

Thanks,
Gerald

Best Answer

Limitations of Automator

Your Automator workflow may require access to the WindowServer to work. Automator is designed to be run within an active user session, and not from a shell session.

The Apache user launching your Automator workflow is running without access to the WindowServer and this will likely limit which actions you can use.

ImageMagik

Consider using an image processing tool designed for command line use, such as ImageMagik. Take a look at the -greyscale option for your conversion:

convert in.png -grayscale Rec709Luminance out.png

Related Solutions

MacOS – Automator or AppleScript Rename Workflow

Here's a script:

set thefolder to "path:to:folder" as alias
tell application "Finder"
    set filename to name of first item of folder thefolder
    set oldDels to AppleScript's text item delimiters as string
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "." as string
    set itemname to first text item of filename
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldDels as string
    set name of thefolder to itemname
end tell

It gets the name of the first item in the folder, clips off the extension, and renames the folder.

Note that it doesn't convert to uppercase as in your example. This is less than trivial with AppleScript, but let me know if it's real important and I can give you the code.

How to use automator make this workflow

I have found two services to be much easier to automate for uploading videos.

Posterous - this site takes uploads as emails and also has an API, but email is the way to go for simplicity.
Vimeo - Vimeo has several API that are well documented and allow uploads through the API so this might be a better choice if you are more into programming than scripting/light automation.

I would go with posterous since you can set it up to autopost to just about any other social site and only have to script the generation of an email per attachment. It can automatically push your videos when they arrive to YouTube, Vimeo, FaceBook, Flickr and many, many other sites.

Lastly, don't forget that iPhoto works well with Automator and AppleScript and has upload to YouTube functionality built in. It should be doable to automate import the folder into an album/event and automate the clicks to publish to YouTube - but not nearly as easy as using Posterous.