1. When getting image size info it’s often useful to have the data in a spreadsheet to highlight images below a certain size. Ideally sips would therefore output “filename \t width \t height”, i.e. one line per file, with each piece of information separated by tabs.

At the moment I’ve directed the output to a file (e.g. sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight [image-file] > results.txt) then opened in TextWrangler and done some find and replace operations:
a) Find pixelWidth, plus the line break and spaces before and the space after. Replace with \t (in TextEdit press alt and tab)
b) Do the same for the pixelHeight.

You could probably do this find and replace on the command line. This example gives an idea, although it does not work because sed doesn’t recognise the \n and \t characters.
sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight /path/to/folder/* | sed -E “/\n( pixelWidth: | pixelHeight: )/s//\t/” > /path/to/textfile.txt

2. The –resampleHeightWidthMax option is useful to make an image fit within a certain size such as 160 pixels. But if you want to fit the image within a rectangular shape such as 120×160 you can’t. Using both –resampleWidth and –resampleHeight options together gives some odd results, although doesn’t seem to stretch the picture even though the man page suggests it will.

3. It doesn’t work with EPS files. You need to use pstopdf first.

4. The pad images option always centres the image within the padded area. There’s no way to change this.

Many of sips’ features are accessible via Automator, too, such as the Pad Images command. If you need to use the command line sips tool via Automator, add a Run Shell Script action that takes input ‘as arguments’ and does something like this:

for f in “$@”
do
sips –addIcon –setProperty format tiff –setProperty formatOptions best –setProperty formatOptions lzw –resampleHeightWidthMax 160 “$f” –out “`dirname “$f”`/`basename “$f”|cut -d ‘.’ -f1`”.tiff
done

This takes the current item Automator is looking at, makes a TIFF no bigger than 160×160 and outputs it with the same filename as the original but with .tiff on the end.

which are for all intents and purposes are equal, but apple script wont let me cast them as date type. are there any built-ins or tricks for evaluating this kind of format with applescript or even the date command from a terminal?

thanks

But for some reason the subroutine doesn’t get evaluated as a date. If I force it to return a date it works, so I use
return date lastopen
not
return lastopen

I do it by getting the app to store the last login date in my preferences, and compare the last login with today. But If I do

do shell script (“defaults write org.pureandapplied.startupscript ‘lastopen’ ‘” & (current date) & “‘”)
set lastopen to do shell script (“defaults read org.pureandapplied.startupscript ‘lastopen’”)
day of lastopen

it doesn’t treat the value returned as a date:
“Can’t make \”Wednesday, 14 January 2009 12:05:29 PM\” into type date.”

I can do it with text munging, or by checking the modification date on a file, but that’s nowhere near as elegant.