Publish Aperture for iPhone

Our buddies at Automator.us continue their explorations of the iPhone as it relates to automating tasks on the Mac. A couple of weeks ago I detailed their iPhone Mail Rules scripts. With these scripts you could send a message from your iPhone and trigger Mail rules that would do such things as add pictures from your iPhone to an iWeb blog, add iPhone pictures to iPhoto, return a list of a particular folder’s documents to the iPhone, and ask Mail to send a specific document to you as an email attachment. Their latest effort, Publish for iPhone, is another intriguing project.

The gist is this: With the help of this script, Aperture, and Apple’s Personal Web Sharing, you can easily format Aperture images and share them with the world via the personal web server built into OS X.

More specifically, open the Sharing system preference, enable Personal Web Sharing (found in the Services tab), and note the address (http://12.34.56.7, for example). This is the address others will enter in their browser to view your images.

Install the Publish for iPhone script in the Scripts folder associated with Apple’s Aperture (youruserfolder/Library/Scripts/Applications/Aperture). If you don’t have an Aperture folder in this location, create one. If the Script menu isn’t visible in the Mac’s menu bar, run the Applescript Utility application located in the Applications/AppleScript folder and enable the Show Script Menu in Menu Bar option.

Launch Aperture, select the images you want to publish, and choose Publish for iPhone from the Script menu. The script will ask you for a name for the server folder (enter any name you like, but no spaces allowed), the web sharing address (that http: Personal Web Sharing address I mentioned earlier), and a name for your collection. Finally, a dialog box appears offering a variety of image export options. For viewing images on the iPhone I found the Fit Within 640 x 640 options to be just fine. The script does the rest.

When you log into this address from your iPhone browser (note that the address must include not only the original address but also the directory of images—http://12.34.56.7/pictures/, for example) you’ll see four thumbnail images on screen accompanied by numbered links that lead to additional images above. Tap an image to see it full size. As with any Safari-delivered image on an iPhone you can stretch and pinch the image to resize it.

Additionally, you can easily mail a link to any of the images from your iPhone. Just tap Mail Image Link beneath the image you want to mail a link to and the iPhone’s Mail application opens with a message that includes the address of the image in the body of the message.

Category: Tips & Troubleshooting

Posted by Christopher Breen on Aug 4 2007, 12:53 AM ET

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