MacOS – How do Services work on Mac OS X Lion (I can’t make them appear in Menu Bar)

macosservices

I'm trying to create a service (in this case, operating on images in Evernote.app).

I open up Automator, make my script, and set it to to receive 'image files' in 'any application'. Doesn't show up either in the menubar (Evernote > Services -> "My Image Service"), or in the context-menu (Right-click image, services are at end of menu).

Changing the selection to: no input, files, files or directories, etc. makes no difference. Changing the application to Evernote.app makes no difference.

The thing that makes me think I'm missing something: if I set the application to Preview.app, I also can't get any services to appear in the menu bar. Is there something I have to do to trigger their appearance there?

(EDIT: my question got cut off for some reason – fixed that)

Best Answer

Make sure that the service is being saved to ~/Library/Services as a .workflow file. It only seems to include Services in the menubar when they are saved to this path.

Additionally, ensure that the Services folder is not an alias to another folder. It should show up as a normal folder in finder. I had a similar problem and was able to resolve it by removing the alias I created in ~/Library/. Instead of my Services alias, I created the Services folder as a normal folder. Once I did that, every script that was saved there began to appear in the menu as expected.

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