How to Resize an Image Batch in Photoshop CS4

Resizing a bunch of images manually can be a huge pain. Luckily, Photoshop CS4 can do all the work for you!

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Some pictures

1. 
    
   Pictures.

   If the pictures you want to resize aren't already all in one folder, put them in one. This isn't strictly necessary for batch processing, but it'll make the job a lot simpler.

2. 
    
   Photoshop CS4.

   Open Photoshop CS4.

3. 
    
   Action panel.

   Before you can start batch resizing your images, you're going to have to create an action set.
   
   Go to your Action panel (if you don't see the Action panel, you can access it by going to the "Window" menu at the top and selecting "Action").
   
   At the bottom of the Action panel, click the icon that looks like a folder to create a new set. Name the set "Resize" and click OK.

4. 
    
   Creating a new action.

   Next, you'll need to create an action in your action set. Do this by clicking the "Create New Action" icon (between the "Create New Set" icon and the "Delete" icon).
   
   Name the action "Resize" as well, and click Record.

5. 
    
   Open an image.

   Now it's time to record the actual actions that will going into your batch processing.
   
   First, open an image. It can be one from the set you want to process, but it doesn't have to be. You can do this with File > Open, or by dragging and dropping a picture into Photoshop.

6. 
    
   Resize the image.

   Next, it's time to resize the image.
   
   Go to Image > Image Size to bring up the resizing image. Next to either Width or Height, click the drop-down menu and select "Percentage".
   
   Type in the percentage of the current size that you want your images resized to. For example, if you want them to be half their current size, then type in "50%".
   
   Click OK.

7. 
    
   Save the image.

   Save the newly-resized image.

8. 
    
   Stop recording your actions.

   Now click the square button at the bottom of the Actions panel to stop your actions from being recorded to the action set.
   
   You now have your action set ready to be used for batch resizing.

9. 
    
   Batch processing.

   It's time to put your action set to good use.
   
   Open the batch processing menu by going to File > Automate > Batch.
   
   At the top of the Batch menu, select the "Resize" action set for "Set", and the "Resize" action for "Action".
   
   In the next section, choose "Folder" from the source menu and choose the folder containing the pictures you want to resize using the "Choose..." button.
   
   You'll probably want to check the Suppress File Open Options Dialogs in order to avoid a lot of unnecessary clicking.
   
   Select "Folder" from the Destination menu, and choose the folder you want to save your resized images to.
   
   The "File Naming" section gives you a number of options for how the resized images will be named, but the default works just fine, so there's no need to adjust it unless you just want to.

10. Click "OK" and let Photoshop do its magic!
    
    After some time processing (depending on how many pictures you've got it working on), you're all done!
    
    Go check out your newly-resized pictures in whatever folder you had them saved to.

Tips & Warnings

• Although this article was written with CS4 in mind, the process is very close in earlier versions of Photoshop as well and you should be able to follow along.

[allenm541]

on 12/9/2009 I'm having a difficult time with this. The "Open" command in the macro opens the same file over and over again rather than continuing on to the next file in the list. The result is that even though I have 15+ photos in the folder, only one gets re-sized. Might be a Photoshop bug with Windows 7.

[PurpleFruhead]

on 12/6/2009 I used this for Photoshop 7 on my PC and it worked like a charm! Thank you for saving me HOURS of work if I had to do this manually!