For the Mavericks project, I get to transcode 9 DVD-ROMs worth of high resolution TIFF images into JPEG images for use during authoring by Pachyderm (I could use the TIFFs directly, but that would tax the system more than I'd like to during beta testing).
At first, I was wondering what to do about this. Back in the day, I'd use Debabelizer Pro, or a Photoshop action or something.
But, I just fired up Automator.app, and in less than 60 seconds had whipped up a Workflow that finds all TIFF images buried within a selected folder (or volume), copies them to a designated folder on my hard drive, then transcodes them to .jpg files. Exactly what I needed. In under a minute. It's going to take a while to run (copying and transcoding roughly 40GB of images may take some time), but the process is now almost completely Automated. I couldn't find the Finder action for automatically swapping DVDs unattended, or I'd just let this sucker run unattended all weekend...
In my books, this one task just paid for my Tiger upgrade.
Update: After it's done processing the first DVD, I'll see if I can tweak the Workflow to display status information. Right now, it's slowly copying files from the DVD, and there's no direct way to see how much is left to go (I can go into Terminal and ls -1 | wc -l to see how many files are in the target directory, and hit Activity Monitor's "Disk Activity" tab, but a nice shiny thermometer progress bar would be nice...