Batch Resize in Photoshop CS4 Tutorial

I’ve just returned home from a week vacation in the Mexican Mayan Riviera, and now I want to store my pictures on my netbook so my wife can look at them, and easily share them with friends. An probably post them to my Flickr account!

The problem is, my 8 mega-pixel camera generates images that are 3296 x 2472 (that means 3296 pixels wide and 2472 pixels tall) but the screen on my netbook (an Asus eeePC) is only 800×468.

Storing them directly on the netbook takes up a lot of storage space as each image is 2.01 MB  in size, and viewing them in the slideshow method is very slow since the images are so large and are being rescaled to appear on the small screen.

The way to fix this is to resize all the pictures to make them smaller (screen-wise AND according to the amount of space they take up on the hard drive) and keep those on the netbook.

I’ve chosen Photoshop CS4 to do this. I’ve just downloaded the 30 day trial version from Adobe.com (its Photoshop’s 20th anniversary!). If you have a different version of Photoshop on your computer, try the methods and see how far you can get… it might still work!

To start, store all your pictures in a folder on your computer, such as My Documents\My Pictures\Vacation.

Then:

1. Open Photoshop
2. Click File -> Scripts -> Image Processor
   1. If you don’t see the Scripts option, click “Show All Menu Items”



3. Click the Select Folder button in area (1) and browse to the folder where your images are stored, then click OK.
4. In area (2) Select Location to save processed images, you can choose a new location. If you leave it as Same Location, your images will not get overwritten.  A new folder will be created and the modified images will be stored there.
5. Choose your file format (your options are JPEG, PSD or TIFF) and also you can set the Resize to Fit option… which is what we want! I’ve specified 800×600 as it is a standard size, and the netbook will scale it rather nicely.
6. Make sure you set the Quality setting to 10 or 12 (the default was 5), as 12 is the highest level of JPEG compression you can have.  This process will cause a bit of a loss of image quality, but by setting the quality to 12, you probably won’t be able to notice with just your eyes when viewing the image on a computer screen. People concerned with printing high-quality images will probably use TIFF instead.
7. In area (4) at the bottom of the dialog, you can even add some copyright information for your images if you want. This appears in the advanced properties of the file, and is not written onto the image.
8. When you are done setting things up, click the Run button in the top, right corner of the dialog box!

Photoshop will then open every photo individually, make the change, and save the modified photo (with its original name) into the new folder. Since I chose JPEG, folder named JPEG was created. All the images will be modified and have their original file names, but will be stored in the new folder. In my case all the images were JPEG to begin with. If you decide you want all your pictures to be PSD or TIFF, the new folder will have that name instead.

Now with my camera I can take some movies as well. There was a movie file stored in the folder along with the other images, so at the end of the process I received a message saying that the .AVI file could not be processed. All other images were modified… and they look great.

Now I just have to through and crop them all!

Added Bonus:

• My 2.10 MB pictures are now 282 KB each with a Quality setting of 10.
• I re-ran the process again with a Quality setting 12. Each images is now 510 KB but I cannot detect any noticeable difference in quality when viewed on-screen.
• The second run of the procedure didn’t delete the first batch of photos, it renamed them with an _1 at the end of each file name.

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Tagged as: creative process, photoshop, tutorial

Post written on 2010-02-21