Integrating Sparrow and Aperture/iPhoto

In my recent quest to take on digital photography, I’ve been using Apple’s Aperture to store download my pictures and do basic manipulation on them. It’s been working great, except that emailing is a pain because Apple hardcoded the email clients to:

• Apple Mail.app
• Eudora (really!?)
• America Online(!?!)
• Microsoft Entourage
• Microsoft Outlook

while I’d prefer to use Sparrow, a lightweight client that Sharvil got me hooked on a while back. Rather than continue to use Mail.app to send pictures via email, I found out that Aperture actually uses some AppleScripts to do the actual sending of the email. That got me thinking: I just need to change the script to mail using Sparrow, instead of Mail.

So all I needed to do is replace /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/PlugIns/Mail.applescript with the following script:

-- Mail from Sparrow.app instead of Mail.app
-- Travis Johnson (traviscj@traviscj.com)
on mail_images(email_subject, default_address, image_count, new_files, ¬
                new_captions, new_comments, cancel_string)
    try
        tell application "Sparrow"
            activate
            set theMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {¬
                subject:email_subject, ¬
                ---"Check out my sweet pictures!"}
            tell theMessage
                repeat with image_idx from 1 to image_count
                    set this_imagefile to item image_idx of new_files
                    set attachmentfilename to POSIX file this_imagefile
                    make new mail attachment with properties {¬
                        filename:attachmentfilename as alias}
                end repeat
                compose
            end tell

        end tell
    on error error_message number error_number
        log error_message & " " & error_number
        if the error_number is not -128 then
            tell application "Finder"
                beep
                display dialog error_message buttons {cancel_string} ¬
                    default button 1
            end tell
        end if
    end try
end mail_images

Now, magically, I can press the ‘Email’ button in Aperture, and Sparrow pops up with a new email, and the proper file attached! Hooray!

I looked into doing the same thing with iPhoto; a slightly different proceedure is needed here. I opened /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt with Script Editor via the terminal:

$ open /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt

then pasted in the above code, clicked ‘Compile’, then ‘Save’. iPhoto then worked as expected, opening a new Sparrow message with the files attached.