6 Ways to Use Mac Automator With Your Browser

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6 Ways to Use Mac Automator With Your Browser

Automator is one of the most underappreciated tools on your Mac. It takes a while to get the hang of, but once you have an idea how to use it, you can automate all kinds of useful tasks, from opening URLs to downloading images.

One of the best ways to use Automator is with its browser commands. These can save you a lot of time with regular actions in Safari or your web browser of choice.

Many of us visit and revisit certain webpages at the same time every day. Maybe you need to open the same webpage every day before you start working, or maybe you’ve got a Pinterest board of motivational quotes you like to read every Monday morning.

Either way, you can save yourself some time by making Automator open those webpages for you. Here’s how:

Open Automator from the Utilities folder in your Applications (or search for it with Spotlight using Cmd + Space). Create a New Document, then choose Calendar Alarm.

Select Internet from the sidebar and drag the Get Specified URLs action to the workflow on the right. Remove the default URL and add the page you want Automator to open (for this example, we used the MakeUseOf homepage).

Now drag the Display Webpages action into the workflow and place it below the previous action. You’ll see one produces output and the other takes input, so they’re connected.

Hit the Run button in the top-right corner to test the alarm. Automator should open the webpage you entered in your default browser. If it doesn’t, double-check that you followed all the instructions above.

Finally, go to File → Save to save the project. When you do so, Calendar opens a new event (in our case, it’s called “Display MakeUseOf”). Edit the event in your calendar to repeat whenever you want Automator to open that URL.

In the example above, Automator will open MakeUseOf every Friday at 5:50pm. Make any desired changes here so the page displays at your preferred days and times.

There are probably groups of webpages you always open together. For some, that might mean five different social media accounts. Others may always open their work email, calendar, and to-do list.

Again, go to Internet and drag Get Specified URLs into the workflow, then add the list of webpages you want Automator to open at the same time. We used a few Hearthstone-related pages.

Save the application with a meaningful name, then launch it using Spotlight to open a huge number of webpages with just a few keystrokes!

We called this Automator application “hearthstone-read,” and can use it to open four URLs in an instant.

This is a workflow automation, which means you need to run it from within Automator. Even though opening Automator might seem like an extra step, this is still a much quicker way to download all the images from your active webpage.

Again, go to the Internet category in the sidebar. This time, add Get Current Webpage from Safari to the workflow. Unfortunately, this workflow only works with Safari, but in many ways Safari is a better browser than Chrome

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Below that, add Get Image URLs from Webpage and set the Get URLs of images dropdown to on these webpages.

Add Download URLs to the bottom of the workflow and set your preferred download location. We chose to stick with the Downloads folder.

To download all the images from a specific webpage, open that page in Safari and run this workflow in Automator. Depending on how many images are on that page, it might take a while to download.

After downloading images, you can resize them, rename them, or reorganize them using other Automator workflows

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You can do something similar with audio or video files by using a slightly more complicated workflow. This makes it possible to download all the audio or video files on a particular webpage from within Automator.

If you select Only returns URLs in the same domain as the starting page, you only get audio or video files hosted on the same domain as the page you’re on. Conversely, if you don’t select it, you get all the files linked from the page, no matter where they are.

Now add the Filter URLs action to the workflow. How you set up the filter depends on what you want to download. For example, if you only want MP3 files, set the Path to contain .mp3. For MP4 videos, set the Path to contain .mp4, and so on.

Then run the workflow from within Automator to download your chosen media from any open pages in Safari.

If you ever wished a website would release its own app, or if you prefer to use multiple browsers windows rather than multiple tabs, you might like to use Automator to open a specific webpage as its own app.

The first action is to Get Specified URLs, w…

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