Just ran across an awesome new tool: Dropbox Automator!

This is a pretty wild one. Essentially, you can create rules (or “automations”) for Dropbox via this web tool that triggers certain actions based on filetypes. I’ll quote TechCrunch‘s linked article:

Not only are they trigged by file type (e.g. a photo, a .doc, a PDF, etc.), they’re also triggered based on which Dropbox folder the file has been placed into.

For documents, you can choose from actions like convert to PDF, convert PDF to text, summarize, translate, upload to Google Docs, upload to Slideshare and more. Photos can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, rotated, annotated with text, a map or a logo, have effects applied, and downscaled.

Any file can be emailed, zipped, renamed, FTP’d, encrypted or decrypted, saved to another Dropbox, tweeted, or set as a Facebook status.

I use Google Docs extensively, but almost everyone else on earth uses Word Excel etc. I use OpenOffice for dealing with my non-Docs clients directly, but always manually import and sort them into Docs when I’m done. One use I thought of for Dropbox Automator is saving whatever Word documents I’m working with into a special shared Dropbox folder that I use with my crew, so that those files will automatically be uploaded into Google Docs without my having to manually importsavesort it. Timesaver!

Another example is having a secure offsite FTP to automatically back up anything my clientscontractors post into Dropbox, optionally with encryption for security. 🙂

This is incredibly cool, and I can’t wait to dig into this. Automation tools for the win!

Do you guys have any other cool ideas on how this could work? Would love to hear!