How to Batch Resize Images Without a Photo Editing Program on Your Mac

Included with Mac OS X Tiger is a program called "Automator" which allows you to create your own mini-programs using various actions from many of the programs on your Apple computer. You can create a program on your Mac to back up a set of folders with one click, or gather all the URLs from a specific web page, and even batch resize images without a graphics program.

You may need to resize all 200 super-high resolution photos you took on your vacation to Costa Rica to make them a manageable size to upload to your photo sharing account. Resizing 200 images manually is a huge chore, and if you don't have a fancy photo editing program, you'll not be able to take advantage of batch processing.

Here are the steps to create your own program in Automator to batch resize images you've selected, save them to a specific folder and rename them without a photo editing program such as Adobe PhotoShop.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Apple Computer running Mac OSX Tiger

1. 

   Launch Automator. It should be in your Applications Folder. You can access this from your dock or by opening up a new Finder window and navigating to the Applications Folder.

2. 

   Click on "Finder" in the "Library" column on the far left of the Automator window.

3. 

   Drag the "Ask For Finder Items" Action from the middle column over to the right to the area that says "Drag or add actions here to build your workflow."

4. 

   Type in "Choose the Images to Resize:" in the "Prompt" field and make sure the "Allow Multiple Selection" check box is checked. This step tells the Automator Workflow to open a finder window in Mac OSX Tiger so you can select the images you want to resize. The "Prompt" is what will appear in the title bar of that window.

5. Drag over the "Rename Finder Items" action from the Action list and place it under the "Ask for Finder Items" action that you just added in Step 3.

6. 

   Click "Add" on the Warning that pops up. This will add a "Copy Finder Items" action as well as the "Rename Finder Items" action so that your original images are preserved just in case you need them later.

7. 

   Select the directory to save all your resized images. It can be directly on the desktop, or you can create another folder to keep all of them in one place. In the "To" drop-down in this action, select "Other" and navigate to the folder to keep all your resized images.

8. 

   Select "Add Text" in the first drop-down box of the "Rename Finder Items" box in your Automator Workflow.

9. 

   Type "resized" in the "Add" Field. This will add the word "resized" to the end of each image filename.

10. 

    Click on "Preview" in the "Library" column on the far left. This will bring up the actions available using the "Preview" PDF & image viewer application that came with your Apple computer.

11. 

    Drag over the "Scale Images" action from the middle "Action" column to your workflow.

12. 

    Select "By Percentage" in the drop-down menu and type in 50 in the text box next to the drop-down. You can scale the images to a specific size in pixels instead if you prefer.

13. 

    Test your workflow by hitting the "Run" button in the top right of the Automator Window.

14. Select your images from the Finder window that pops up and let the program run.

15. 

    If everything worked properly, each step in your workflow window should have a light green check mark in the lower left corner.

16. 
    The folder where all the resized images should be stored.

    Open the folder you specified to store the resized images. All the images you selected should be there, and they should be resized. You can check this by right-clicking each item and selecting "Info"--the size of the image is in the "More Info" section of this window. If the images are not in the folder, or the program fails, go back over each step and double-check your actions.

17. 
    This is the icon that's created on the desktop.

    Save your workflow by selecting File > Save As. Name your new mini-program "Batch Resize" or something similar and save it to your desktop so you'll have easy access to it. Next time you need to resize lots of images, just double-click your new program and let it run. Congratulations! You just made your very own program on your Apple Computer in Mac OSX Tiger!

Tips & Warnings

• Play around with workflow, there are lots of things you can do including backing up your folders to an external hard drive or even an FTP server.
• If you ever need to edit the Batch Resize workflow you created, expand the "My Workflows" folder in the Library list in Automator and drag it over just like you did in creating each step of this workflow. All the steps show up and you can alter them if you need to.

[okdelph]

on 8/18/2008 It worked! Thanks a lot for your great directions!!! This saves tons of time!!! Evharisto!

[alexiapetrakos]

on 4/21/2008 There are lots of online image editing programs popping up all over the place. Adobe has an online version of photoshop, I think photobucket & snapfish have some image editing capabilities, and my favorite so far has to be picnik.com.

[saadi]

on 4/19/2008 You can resize images online for free while maintaining quality. Well, maybe it won't work perfectly for all images, but it's still better than any other free resizing tool out there. It doesn't do batch processing though :( The technology is called reshade. You can do a search for it on google or just go directly to their website: reshade.com

Hope you like it. I'm pretty enthusiastic about it, never even heard of a free tool like this before!