Mr. CodeBoy


Mr. CodeBoy has fond memories of programming his Commodore 64 during the 1980's. In fact, he was still using his custom programs as late as 1992, at which time he contracted microprocessor fever, and entered the world of Windows.

The first few years were not too bad, but once digital photography became mainstream, it was clear to Mr. CodeBoy that it was time to put the baby computing power of a 386x system on the shelf, and invest in a real machine. He purchased his first iBook (G3) in December 2001. The following summer, he picked up a used PowerMac (dual G4), and by the spring of 2003, he was learning AppleScript.

Mr. CodeBoy was completely overtaken by the opportunities to automate his machines, as well as to simplify boring tasks that forced him to spend way too much time at the keyboard. His reasoning was simple: Why waste 20 minutes doing repetitive tasks when one can spend 3 hours generating an AppleScript to do it automatically?

This section serves as a jumping point to a number of AppleScripts that Mr. CodeBoy still finds useful. He sincerely hopes that you will find something that you can use as well.

This page will help you configure your Mac to easily access and run AppleScripts.

Find No Keyword Images

Click to download

iPhoto's Smart Album feature allows some pretty powerful organizational control, except for one small detail. What if you want to know which images in your Library have absolutely no Keywords assigned to them at all? Smart Albums are not smart enough yet, so run this script every so often to sort through your library and classify those photos that fell through the keywording cracks. Whenever it is run, an Album entitled No Keywords Assigned will be created (if necessary) and filled with any images in your library that are still awaiting keywords. It will also remove any images from that album that do have keywords. If that album exists, and is empty, the album will be removed.

The download will result in a zipped file tagged with the file extension gz. Double-clicking the file will expand it into an AppleScript file, which you then place in your Scripts folder for easy access. This works pretty quickly on smaller iPhoto libraries, but be patient when invoking it on the larger collections.