Mass Photo Editing

[Briseis]

I just got back from my honeymoon with 1200 hi-res photos that are too big to do anything with, even to view with any amount of ease. They are about 6000x4000. I know using MO Picture Manager I could very easily change the dimensions of all the photos at one time. But I dont have MO. All I have is photoshop 7.0, which is an awesome program, but I dont know of any way to edit more than one photo at a time. I am not going to go through 1200 pictures and change the dimensions one at a time. Does anyone know a simply Picture Manager alternative, or a way to edit multiple pictures at a time in photoshop? It would be much appreciated.

 

[Qyöt27]

If all you want to do is resize them down to a manageable resolution, Photoshop 7 can do that. You have to use the ability to create your own actions, and then make that action run against the folder the photos are in.

If I remember my methodology correctly:
1) Open any one of the photos in Photoshop.
2) Tell Photoshop to create a new action and start recording it. The Actions set is on the History toolbox, second tab in. The 'Create New Action' button is the one next to the Trash Can.
3) Do the proper resizing as you normally would.
4) Save the image in the format (JPG, PNG, whatever) of your choice, to a different folder. Subfolders work great for this purpose.
5) Close the image.
6) Tell Photoshop to stop recording the action.

Now, you can use the Batch option to process all the images automatically. Go to the File menu, Automate, and then Batch. Set up the Batch options like the attached screenshot shows, then use the Choose button to select the folder with the images and then click OK. It may or may not ask you where to save the new smaller copies of the images (since that was part of the Action that was recorded), and then you can leave it alone for however long it takes to cycle through them.

 

[Qyöt27]

And while I didn't mention it, there's also probably a simple way to do this with ImageMagick through a single command in a batch script (or the regular old Command Prompt/Terminal), but I'm not really vetted enough with ImageMagick to feel comfortable giving advice on that.

I know it can resize images and save them in different formats through the command line (and I have used it that way before), and therefore, it's also possible to automate it by using wildcard parameters. I just have never needed to do that with ImageMagick.

 

[heron]

Do you have Adobe Bridge?

 

[Crystal-Studio]

Qyöt27
Greate post! That is right!

 

[awitch]

I'm pretty sure you can also download Picasa (by Google) for free. It has a native feature to resize all the photos in a folder.

 

[Sketcher]

I would hang onto the huge copies, if only for safekeeping. Sizing an image down is easy, but sizing it back up and actually having it retain quality is another story. The 110% trick breaks down after you do it enough times.