Automate sending images via text with Mac OS Messages

How I sent out images to 80 phone numbers in 12 minutes with Mac OS Messages

My wife has been a bit overwhelmed this summer with going back to school and planning a wedding for our daughter. Last night after doing some yard work we sat down and she said, "I need your help sending out all these invites." She had a spreadsheet with 80 phone numbers. I imagined manually copying and pasting that image into Messages 80 times and it didn't sound appealing, so I said, "Let me see if I can script it".

It took longer than I had hoped because I struggled getting the image to attach and display properly and work on both iOS and Android. I don't have an Android phone to test with, so I was using my Google Voice account to send tests to. Eventually I got it to work. In the process, I added a lot of debugging statements and logging so this script may be unnecessarily complex. But it works!

1#!/bin/zsh
2
3# Path to the file containing phone numbers
4PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE="phone_numbers.txt"
5
6# Path to the image to be attached
7IMAGE_PATH="invite.jpg"
8
9# Log file
10LOG_FILE="send_messages.log"
11
12# Function to log messages to both the screen and the log file
13log_message() {
14  echo "$1"
15  echo "$1" >> "$LOG_FILE"
16}
17
18# Start logging
19log_message "Script started at $(date)"
20
21# Check if the phone numbers file exists
22if [[ ! -f "$PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE" ]]; then
23  log_message "Phone numbers file $PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE does not exist."
24  exit 1
25fi
26
27# Check if the image file exists
28if [[ ! -f "$IMAGE_PATH" ]]; then
29  log_message "Image file \"$IMAGE_PATH\" does not exist."
30  exit 1
31fi
32
33# Log the contents of the phone numbers file
34log_message "Contents of $PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE:"
35cat "$PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE" | while read -r line; do
36  log_message "$line"
37done
38
39# Read the phone numbers from the file and send the image
40while read -r PHONE_NUMBER; do
41  if [[ -n "$PHONE_NUMBER" ]]; then
42    log_message "Processing phone number: $PHONE_NUMBER"
43
44    # Copy image to clipboard using AppleScript
45    osascript <<EOF
46      set the clipboard to (read (POSIX file "$(realpath "$IMAGE_PATH")") as JPEG picture)
47EOF
48
49    # Send image using GUI scripting
50    osascript <<EOF
51      tell application "Messages" to activate
52      delay 1
53      tell application "System Events"
54        keystroke "n" using {command down}
55        delay 1
56        keystroke "$PHONE_NUMBER"
57        keystroke return
58        delay 1
59        repeat 5 times
60          keystroke tab
61          delay 0.2
62        end repeat
63        repeat 6 times
64          key code 51
65          delay 0.2
66        end repeat
67        keystroke "v" using {command down}
68        delay 1
69        keystroke return
70      end tell
71EOF
72    log_message "Image sent to $PHONE_NUMBER"
73    sleep 3
74
75  else
76    log_message "Empty or invalid phone number line encountered"
77  fi
78done < "$PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE"
79
80log_message "Script ended at $(date)"

Instructions for creating and running the script:

Create a new file with a .sh extension (e.g. send_image_invites.sh)
Copy the above code into the file
Replace $IMAGE_PATH with the full path to the image file you want to send
Create a file containing the phone numbers you want to send the image to, one per line (e.g. phone_numbers.txt)
Replace $PHONE_NUMBERS_FILE with the full path to the phone numbers file
Save the script file
Open Terminal and navigate to the directory containing the script file
Make the script executable with the command: chmod +x send_image_invites.sh
Run the script with the command: ./send_image_invites.sh

The script will log its progress to the console and send the specified image to each phone number in the phone numbers file using the Messages app on macOS. The great part about this method was that I could watch it doing all the work.