I learn something new about Photoshop everyday, but I’ve yet to figure out if you can automate a process, and if so, how. So maybe someone reading this can help. Basically what I want to do is after loading, say, 20-30 photos into PS, I want the image size to automatically adjust to 128×96 so I can save them (these are the size of the thumbnails I use for my photography site). I’m just lazy, and I hate having to manually do them myself. Any ideas?
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I wish I could help. I just recently acquired Photoshop, and it’s a bit complicated to say the least.
ok – i’ve got PS open, but i’m still flying by the seat of my pants, as it were. hopefully this will help though.
– open a picture that you want to resize.
– in the top menu, go to “Windows” and make sure Actions has a check by it.
– look for the Actions tab.
– look for the little icon underneath the list of actions that looks like a peice of paper (should say “make new action” or something
– click it and name it and give it a function key if you want and color it if you want.
– then click record. the little icon that looks like a stop sign should be red and highlighted now.
– go to “Image — Resize” and enter your dimensions.
– you can either stop now, or keep going (do more stuff to your picture that you want done to all future pictures.
– next to the red stop sign-y icon, find the square icon, and click that (that stops recording)
– Voila, you now have an action.
Now, say you want to resize them all in one shot.
– Go to “File — Automate — Batch”
– Select your action (by whatever you named it) and your source and destination folders (i’d call my destination folder “Same as other folder – resized” (so you don’t overwrite the originals in case it goes screwy), click “OK”
– Voila! multiple images resized in one easy step :)
and err – if any of that gives you problems, just come yell at me in email and i’ll figure it out (should work though, i semi tried it as i went along)
good luck! :)
Oh that’s really easy and perfectly suited for a Photoshop action. Actions and automation saved my butt when I was doing that big photo gallery – I must have had 10 custom actions, each with bunches of steps. Anyway, here’s how you do yours:
Fire up Photoshop and locate the History palette. In PS7 that palette also has an Actions tab and a Tool Presets tab. Click the Actions tab.
Open one of the photos for which you want to make a thumbnail. I recommend you create a folder for saving the thumbnails into when you run the new action, but you don’t have to. Click the icon next to the trashcan in the Actions palette, it should say “Create new action”. In the pop-up that appears you don’t really have to change anything, although it might help you to give the action a name. Hit “Record”.
Now do Image -> Image Size, enter the new image size and hit OK. Then File -> Save As, navigate to your new thumbnail folder and save as usual. The way I’d do it is not rename the file during the save, but have Photoshop automatically append an extension when you’re running the new action (later). If you’re using one folder instead of two, just be sure to name the new thumbnail something different than the original filename. Finally, close the image.
Click the square icon at the bottom of the Actions palette – the “Stop playing/recording” icon. Voila, you’ve created a new action. Now to automate it.
Go ahead and remove the test thumbnail you created whilst recording the new action, so you start with a clean and empty thumbnails folder. Put all your original photos into one folder (for simplicity’s sake – you can also just run the action multiple times against one folder after another).
Click File -> Automate -> Batch. Under “Play” choose your action from the menu. Under “Source” choose the “Folder” with all your original photos in it. Under “Destination” choose “Folder”, then pick your thumbnails folder. Click “Override Action Save As Commands” and choose what extension you want added (such as making document “file1” be saved as “file1-thumb” or whatever).
Then click “OK” and Photoshop should take off and do its thing completely automatically, opening each file in the source folder, one at a time, resizing to the dimensions you wanted, saving with a custom extension into a destionation folder, until it’s processed all the files. Easy!
You could probably skip saving the thumbs into a new folder and just have them all saved into the original folder. That would save you a few steps.
Once you get the hang of actions and batching, it’s astounding how productive you can be in Photoshop – it’s an extremely powerful combination!