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Automator is one of the most overlooked tools on the Mac. It takes a while to master, but once you know how to use it, you can automate various useful tasks, from opening URLs to downloading images.
One of the best ways is to use Automator and its browser commands. These features can save a lot of time by using regular operations in Safari or the web browser of your choice.
Let’s look at several ways to use Automator with a browser.
Open a web page at a specific time every day
Many of us visit and revisit certain web pages at the same time every day. Maybe you need to open the same web page every day before you start work, or you may have a Pinterest inspirational quote board every Monday morning.
Either way, you can save some time by letting Automator open these pages for you. The operation method is as follows:
Select Internet from the sidebar, and then drag the Get the specified URL operation to the workflow on the right. Delete the default URL and add the page you want Automator to open.
Click the Run button in the upper right corner to test the alarm. Automator should open the web page you entered in the default browser. If not, please double check that you have followed all the instructions above.
In the example above, Automator will open creeweb.com at 5:50 PM every Friday. Make any desired changes here to display the page on the date and time you like.
Use Automator to open a specific set of web pages
You may always open several sets of web pages together. For some people, this may mean five different social media accounts. Others may always open their work emails, calendars, and task lists.
Why not create an Automator application to open a list of URLs at a time?
Create a “new document” in Automator, and select Application as the document type.
Add the operation of displaying the webpage under Obtain the specified URL, and then you can set it up.
Download all images from the page
This is a workflow automation, which means you need to run it in Automator. Even if opening Automator seems to be an extra step, it is still a faster way to download all the images from the active web page.
Again, please go to the Internet category in the sidebar. This time, the current web page will be fetched from Safari and added to the workflow. Unfortunately, this workflow only applies to Safari, but in any case, Safari is still a better browser than the Chrome browser on the Mac.
Below it, add the URL of the image obtained from the web page and set it to drop the URL of the image to those pages.
To download all images from a specific webpage, open the page in Safari and run this workflow in Automator. Depending on the number of images on this page, the download may take some time.
After downloading the image, you can resize the image, rename the image or use another Automator workflow to reorganize the image.
You can use a slightly more complicated workflow to perform similar operations on audio or video files. In this way, all audio or video files on a specific web page can be downloaded from Automator.
Create another workflow in Automator
Add the operation of getting the current webpage from Safari again.
Now add the filtering URL action to the workflow. The way you set the filter depends on what you want to download. For example, if you only need MP3 files, set the path to include .mp3. For MP4 videos, please set the path to include .mp4, and so on.
Now that you have filtered the URL, please add the download URL action and select a download folder.
Then run the workflow from Automator to download the media of your choice from any open page in Safari.
Launch the website as a standalone application
If you want the website to publish your own application, or if you want to use multiple browser windows instead of multiple tabs, you can use Automator to open a specific web page as your own application.
If you want to use Automator to create a dedicated Google search application, this is a good choice.
Start a new Automator document and select Apply.
The first operation is to get the specified URL, where you need to enter the URL to be converted to a website. An application. For example, we used the Google search page.
Open articles containing specific phrases
RSS feeds are still useful for tasks such as creating your own news feed. But some feeds have been flooded with articles, so it is difficult to find the articles you want.
If you want to find a specific topic or phrase, create an Automator workflow to open articles that match the search query in the search engine.
First, create a workflow in Automator.
Now, use Create a filter to filter the article operation. Suppose we want to delete any articles about the president; we can set a filter to select articles with “president” in the title or abstract.
When you run the workflow, you should get a lot of tags containing articles that match your search criteria. However, please use this workflow with caution, as it may result in a large number of new tags.
Learn to use Automator for more operations
It’s a bit complicated at first, but Automator can be a very useful tool to make Mac more efficient. It takes some time to get used to the application, but after spending some time, you should be able to create various useful workflows, services and applications to make your work more efficient.
Although we are focusing here on using Automator on your web browser, there are many other useful Automator applications that can also be created.
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