Web Design and Development

I can say after today that I love the Batch process in Photoshop for making the same change to a lot of images instead of having to make the change to every image. It is perfect if you are making a photo gallery and need to resize a ton of images. You could use it in conjunction with Actions for almost any effects you want for images though.

I’m sure many of you have used this before and are saying duh! thats old but I think I have used it before but just now did it come in super handy that I am creating a website that has like 10 image galleries with like 300 images all needing to be resized into two different sizes.

Here are the steps to resize your 200 images in minutes:

1. Create the folder that you want the images to be saved in.

2. Then open an image from the original folder that your images are in and make sure that your actions pallet is open and create a new action by clicking on the second to right icon on the bottom next to the trash. name it whatever you want the action to be called, I named it resize 200, since I was resizing the width to 200px hit record and your ready to go.

3. Go over to the image menu and select image size, and make the changes that you need and hit OK.

4. Your now going to save your image for the web with your usual compression settings and click save, make sure that when you save the image that you don’t type in a name and just let it save to the default other wise it will try and save all your images as the same name. You can check to make sure by checking your action and make sure that its just saving to the /directory and not /directory/name.jpg.

5. Now go over back to the actions pallet and click the stop button on the bottom.

6. Go to File and then Automate and choose Batch. Choose the set that your action was in then in the action dropdown of course choose your action that you created.

7. Then for the source choose folder and push the choose button and go to the directory where your original photos are. Some people would say to not check the first two options and check the last two in that top area but I didn’t check any and it came out all right. I also checked them and didn’t see any thing different.

8. Now Choose your destination folder that you want all of the images to be saved in same as you did in the previous step and make sure to check Override Action “Save As” Commands, otherwise you will get the normal save popup when going through the process.

9. Now comes the bad part of this great process you are suppose to be able to create the file name using these boxes and their rules which would be great but it doesn’t work when saving for the web it just ignores it and saves it as the pre existing file name. This would be good for other situations where you weren’t saving for web or exporting. so just choose document name and then extension in the second box. I wanted to be able to save it as document name + _thumb + extension since I was going to be creating two versions but unfortunately if this is what you are trying to do like I said it wont work and you might as well make one folder called thumbs and save them there then edit your action and do it again in the directory above thumbs.

10. Then all you do is hit OK and let it run and boom 30 seconds later you can have 80 or so images all resized and saved. This may lag your computer a bit so you should just take a break for a second and let it run its process. Thats it, let me know if any of you try this and have any problems I will help you out because I had some problems and there are only a couple decent articles that explain it correctly. The file naming thing was annoying me the most because I didn’t know why it wasn’t working.

Although some of you might think of this as being old news I think some people might not know that it is available and with all the little photo galleries out there these days I’m sure you will run into a client wanting one of these implemented and maybe this will come in handy. This could come in handy in so many more ways then just image resizing but to do multiple effects to many images.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 12:02 am and is filed under Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.