Get a list of Screen Savers using Automator

While writing about my previous entry ‘How to remove Screen Saver X‘, I was curious to know what other screen savers existed on my Mac. And since I really did not want to create an xCode project, I thought I would give Automator a go. It’s an interesting tool that allows one to accomplish time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks quickly, efficiently, and effortlessly without writing any code.

So, let’s write a quick automation workflow shall we?

First, let’s find Automator by typing automator in Spotlight.

Click on the Automator link and this will bring up the Automator application. Now we want to create a workflow by selecting the workflow template.

We want to get a list of all screen saver files that reside on our machine. One way to do this is use Spotlight to find the files for us. Type spotlight in the search box and drag it to our workflow area.

Now we can search for any type of file, newsletter, email, whatever you can think of and if it exists on your system you’ll see it in the results panel. Since we are searching for screen saver files, type .saver in the search for box. We can actually execute our workflow in it’s current state by clicking the Run button. If all goes well you will hear a whistle sound to indicate whether your workflow completed successfully or not. You can see warnings, errors and successful messages in the log panel. Now, click on the results panel and you should see a list of screen saver files. How cool is that?

Although we have a list of screen saver files, you may notice there were a few files added that are technically not a screen saver. For instance Spotlight will return any file whose name contains the text saver in it. Therefore we need to find a way to filter the list from unwanted files or more specific non screen saver files. So, how do we accomplish this feat?

I bet there’s an App for that…ahem..Actually there is a workflow item for the job and it’s call the Filter Finder Items. How convenient? Ok, let’s find it by typing ‘Filter Finder’ in the search box. Drag or double-click the item to add it to our workflow.

Now we need to change a couple of the selections. Replace ‘Any Content’ with ‘File Extension’ and replace ‘contains’ with ‘is’ in the respective combo boxes. Type saver in the input box. This workflow is basically saying filter all files Spotlight found that are not of a saver extension type. Too simple, right?

Run the workflow and check out the results panel. Our list is shaping quite nicely now.

So whats left you ask? Well, there are a number of things we could do now. For instance, we could write a workflow that copied all the files to a specific folder on our desktop or simply move the files to the trash bin. For now lets add the list to a new untitled text document so that we can send it to uncle Elton or insert name here.

Search for workflow item ‘New Textedit Document’ and add it to our workflow.

Once again run the workflow and you should see the list has been added to a untitled text document. Be sure to save your workflow so that you can modify/run it any time you need it.

As you can see Automator is quite powerful and can accomplish many different tasks that we all struggle with day in and day out. For those that are interested in creating your own automated workflows be sure to check out these topics. For those that are not interested but would love to have the workflow on hand can get it here.