Get Selected Finder Items bug?

The "Get Selected Finder Items" action does exactly what it says when I am creating a workflow: it gets the items I have selected in Finder and passes them on to the next action. But when I save the workflow as a Finder plugin or as an application, it does not work.

I can't tell whether it doesn't "get" the items, or gets them but doesn't pass them on. Anyway, when I run the workflows from the Automatic window everything is fine, but when I save and try to use the workflows the action fails.

I'm using an Intel Mac with a fully-updated version of Leopard. (as of April 6 '08)

Is the action working for you?

What is the desired outcome of your Workflow? We may need to examine all the bits that add up to the whole. Tiger/Leopard?

Are you creating these Automator apps on Leopard and running them on Leopard as well? It's unfortunate but some of these actions that were made for Tiger do not work in Leopard, including some of the actions that came with Automator.

I am purely Leopard for this workflow.

The overall workflow is dead simple:
1) Get Selected Finder Items
2) Rename from EXIF (an action written in 2005 by Ben Long)

The "Rename" action takes information embedded in an image file and uses it to rename the file. In my case I have it rename my Canon 5d RAW files according to the date and time the exposures were made.

I would suspect some problem with Ben's action because of its age (written 2005), but it *does* work perfectly when I am running the 2-action workflow from the Automator window itself.

Is Ben's "Rename from EXIF" action installed on your Mac? Have you tried opening the finished app in Automator? If there is an action that's outdated, Automator should show you a warning. I have an Automator app that I made on tiger that wouldn't work on Leopard because the "Ask for Finder items" action was outdated. So, I deleted the old "Ask for Finder items" action, replaced it with the new one and now it works.

"Rename from EXIF" is installed. Creating the workflow from scratch does not help. Loading the saved workflow does not yield any error messages.

You can get the action here if you're interested:
http://www.completedigitalphotography.com/?p=454

Ah! It looks like its a problem because of the Intel platform. If I save it as an app it seems to run, exit/crash, and then announce that it cannot run on this architecture from then on.

Odd, though, that it runs properly within Automator itself...

Ah, I can relate to that now. Same problem here. Here's an Automator app that I made on Leopard that converts a text file to an audio file and then opens it in Quicktime that "barely" works by itself on Leopard. However, when you open up the same app in Automator (on Leopard) it works perfectly! Oddly enough, I have a "Tiger" version of this app that will not run in Automator on Leopard but it runs by itself (on Leopard) with the exception of closing Text Edit. Instead of using the "Quit Application" action, I'll try it later with an AppleScript instead. Interesting. There's definitely a glitch somewhere!