When building a presentation in Keynote, I often use Apple’s icons and other images included in OS X to illustrate my slides. This is because Apple’s already done a lot of work creating high-res images for OS X and it’s often helpful to use Apple’s own artwork when illustrating how something works. However, this artwork can also be hard to find as it can be buried deep within applications and other resource files. To help me get this artwork all together in one place, I’ve developed a script to search OS X for icons and other relevant images in various file formats, copy them when found, then organize the copied artwork. For more information, see below the jump.
The artwork I’m looking for is usually stored in the following two locations:
/Applications
/System/Library
It’s also usually in the following file formats:
With this in mind, I’ve developed the following script to search /Applications and /System/Library for icns, pdf and png files and copy them to a folder in /tmp.
Since it’s designed to dig around inside the /System directory, I recommend running this script without root privileges to avoid any potential issues. The vast majority of Apple’s artwork is available in locations where all user accounts have at least read-only access, so it should be able to do its work without needing root privileges.
Once the script has completed its run, it will notify you and display the location of the folder in /tmp with the copied artwork.
The folder in /tmp will have the files sorted by file type, then by the location (Applications or System) from which the images were copied.
For those interested, the script is available on my GitHub repo:
https://github.com/rtrouton/rtrouton_scripts/tree/master/rtrouton_scripts/artwork_copy
