[Pythonmac-SIG] Questions on doing some OS X-specific stuff: Adding file/folder icons from Python?

[Kenneth McDonald]

As a 'fun' project to start learning about calling OS X functionality
from Python, I thought it'd be neat to write a little app that would
go through my photo album (just a whole bunch of dirs with
related pictures in each, not an iPhoto album) and

1) Add a permanent thumbnail to each image.
2) Put a custom folder icon on each folder, consisting
of a thumbnail of the first image in the folder. (Digital
cameras are great, but man, I'm sorta astounded at
the number of pictures I've taken...)

I can use PIL (I assume) to do the image-related stuff, but
what's the best way to attack the assigning-icons-to-files/folders
stuff? PyObjC? I seem to remember reading that Python can
communicate with Applescript, would that be a better route?
At the moment, I know nothing about accessing OS X from
Python, so I'm really just looking for a good way to start
learning. All I want to do with this first thing is to learn how to
make a few OS X calls.

Thanks,
Ken McDonald