Dancing Man Studio Blog Tutorial: Auto Resize Images in CS4

This batch action will let you resize an entire folder to a *smaller* aspect ratio. I use this action to make my photos smaller and more web friendly in prep to load my photography work to my website, or to other third party sites like facebook. Again, this saves time from doing it by hand and makes upload and load time faster. I also would suggest reading my post about Auto Rotating photos. Doing these two together, makes life so much easier, I think.To do this, we will be creating another Batch Action process. Since I explained how to start creating one in my Auto Rotation Tutorial, I will use less details this time. If you need the details on how to start, please reference 1-4 in that post.1. Since the photos have to retain the same image name, and we need these larger files to print and/or edit, create a copy of the folder that you are wanting to do this batch action to. This way we can have one for small format and a large format and we can still manipulate and print these photos with no new restriction on size.2. Start by pulling an image into Photoshop. This image should be larger than the size you want to shrink it to. Again, this step is very important and if not done will screw up the batch action.3. Go to your Action Tab, Click on the "Create A New Action" Button and name it what you would like. I named mine "Save for Website" since that is ultimately what I am using this for.4. While Recording, you will want to go to Image > Image Size. The Image Size box will pop up. My images are fairly large to begin with. For the sake of this tutorial, I will change my Width in the top box to 600 pixels, and the rest of the items change to fit that aspect, and you can see how big in inches the image will in the bottom section of the box. You can adjust yours to fit your needs. Click OK. This action will now show up in the Actions Tab.NOTE: This will create all widths to be the same size, but the size from portrait to landscape will be different. Portrait style will be 600x900 and Landscape style to 600x400. They do retain the same aspect ratio as the original.5. Now that the image is the correct new size, Ctrl + S (or save normally). Then Close the image. Click on the "Stop playing / recording" button. It should look like this when you are finished, and will be ready to run as a batch.6. Make sure to select the copy file when you run your batch so that you still have the original size to play around with and print when needed. Allow the process to do it's magic and then upload to where you need.I hope this was helpful to you and will save you some time to enjoy other things while it runs! Enjoy! Cheers.