Automator on OS X is one of those things I use about once a year, but it always impresses.

Many attempts to use drap and drop to replace programming lead to confusing design. Examples are yahoo pipes, Business Objects, and most of all MS Access.

What’s impressive with Automator is that it always seems it was designed with the very problem you want to solve in mind.

My Problem (apart from the drink)

I use command+shift+4 to get screen grabs a lot. For twitter, for blogs (in fact for this very post), for documents, etc. However I end up with lots of images on my desktop called Picture 1, Picture 2, etc.

I want to keep these, for future use, but want a clutter free desktop.

The problem is, if I try and drag these in to a folder, there will already be a Picture 1, Picture 2 from previous occasions. Leading to annoyingly having to rename every file, or create a sub-directory for each time it runs.

Now I have a simple Automator script.

Each time I run it, it moves everything in to a folder, with the create date in front of the name. It was easy to search for ‘actions’ (‘move’, ‘rename’) and browse (‘Files’ -> ‘Find Files’).