FAST ACTIONS OSX TOOLS "AUTOMATOR"

These are tools for converting or renaming files, by right-clicking and selecting an option under "Special Actions".

For this purpose, we use "Automator".

List of available tools:

Video

• Convert AVI to MP4 (*1)
• Convert MOV to MP4 (*1)
• Convert MOV to GIF (*1)
• Convert Video to HEVC 1:1 (*1)
• Convert Video to HEVC SD (*1)
• Convert Video to MKV (*1)
• Convert Mov to WEBP (*1)
• M3U8 — reconstruct stream video chunks into a single file

Images

• Convert AVIF to JPG
• Convert Image to AVIF
• Convert JPG to HEIC
• Convert HEIC to JPG
• Convert WEBM image to JPG

Documents

• Docs to MD — convert documents to Markdown (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, images and more) (*2)

Utils

• Files Batch Rename
• Folder to HTTP server on port 8080

All tools can process multiple files, sequentially "one after another".

(*1) It works with any video format, not necessarily AVI to..., MOV to... — it can be MP4 to anything.

(*2) Self-installing on first run, no manual setup needed.

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Dependencies

Simply open your terminal and in the same folder, type chmod +x ./install.sh && ./install.sh to install all dependencies and move the tools to their respective folder.

Or, if you prefer, you can do it manually:

First step: install Homebrew — [https://brew.sh/]

Second step:

Videos

brew install ffmpeg ffmpeg2theora

Images

brew install imagemagick

Images AVIF

brew install joedrago/repo/avifenc

Clone the repository and copy all the contents of the workflow folder to /Users/<USER>/Library/Services/

Right-click any file → Quick Actions → Customize, then enable the actions you want.

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Docs to MD

Convert any document to Markdown with a right-click. Useful for feeding files into LLMs, archiving content as plain text, or extracting structured data.

Supported formats: PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, XML, CSV, JSON, ZIP, images (OCR), audio (transcription) and more.

On first run the workflow installs everything automatically:

1. Installs uv (Python package manager) if not present
2. Clones markitdown into ~/.automator/markitdown/
3. Creates a Python 3.12 virtual environment and installs markitdown[all] and markitdown-ocr

From the second run onwards it goes straight to conversion. Output is saved next to the original file:

report.pdf         →  report.md
presentation.pptx  →  presentation.md
spreadsheet.xlsx   →  spreadsheet.md

Setup: open the Docs to MD.workflow in Automator, paste the contents of markitdown/markitdown-service.sh into the Run Shell Script action, save and enable via Quick Actions → Customize.

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How do I know if it's working?

An animated gear appears in your top menu bar while the action runs.

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