Make It Blog

So I realize this isn’t a tip that everyone can use… not too many people have a bunch of very large images they need to shrink down all at once. And not everyone has Photoshop (if you don’t have Photoshop, I have a work-around tip for you at the end).

HOWEVER, I think this handy time-saving tip is pretty awesome and maybe (hopefully) at least a few of you do too:

1. Open Photoshop and then open 5 or so of your images (depending on the size, you can go up to 10!) In this example, I’m shrinking very high quality images (30+ MB!) that they can be used in proposals (where they only need to be 3 MB) so I’m doing 5 at a time. TIP: because of the way this is set up, it’s best to do all the landscape images at one time and then all the portrait images.



2. The fancy name for this trick is “batch processing” and to do it, you need to have the “actions” panel open. If you don’t see the “actions” panel, go to Window> Actions
3. In the “Actions” panel, click on “Create New Action”
4. Name it whatever you’d like (I used “shrink”) and assign it a function key (so that it’s even faster! I used “shift F3”)



5. The “Record” button (red circle) should be on now. If it’s not, click it.
6. Do the steps that you would like on all of your photos. To shrink these file sizes, I:

   • went to Image> Image Size and then changed the height to 1000 pixels (make sure the “constrain portions” box is checked) and then hit “OK”
   • then I went to File> Save As, went to a folder I called “Proposals” (because these images are for proposals) and then changed the file type to jpg
   • then I closed the image. Your “Actions” box should look like this: 

   

7. Stop “recording” by hitting the square button (like on a VCR!)
8. The next image in your assembly line should be open (because you closed the other one while you were recording). Now, all you have to do is hit “Shift F3” for each image. Since it closes the images as you go along, you hardly have to do anything!

If you don’t have Photoshop, there may be something else you can do to shrink a bunch of images at once. This may be a function of Microsoft Outlook, so if you don’t have Outlook, it might not work…

1. In Windows explorer, navigate to the folder with the images you want to shrink (they all have to be in the same folder)
2. Highlight all the images. You can draw a box around all the images, or you can hold “ctrl” while you select them.
3. Right click on one of the highlighted images.
4. Select Send To>Mail Recipient
5. Select the option to “make images smaller”
6. Send the email with the attached (small) images to yourself
7. (after you receive the email) Save all the (small) attachments

If you have all questions, feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment.

Enjoy!