Often times, I need to resize a large number of photos. Resizing makes uploading images to the web much less of a hassle. Most of the time, I don’t need to have five megapixel images taking up space on my server. This is when automation comes in handy. Nobody wants to resize each and every photo individually, so we perform the same action for an entire batch. For this demonstration, I used Automator.
First of all, launch Automator. There will be a dialogue that pops up when you first launch it. Select “Photos & Images.” In the drop-down menus, select “My iPhoto Library” and then “Ask for photos and albums when my workflow runs.” This will populate your first step in your automator workflow.
Now search on the left hand side of the automator window under Actions > Library for “Copy Finder Items.” Add it to your workflow, and then use the drop down window to select the folder to which you want to save your resized files.
Now search under Actions > Library for “Scale Images.” Add this final step to your workflow. Select “By Percentage” in the drop-down, and then type “50” in the text field.
Now press Cmd + Shift + S to bring up the Save As dialogue. Call it “Resize,” save it to “Applications,” and change the file format to “Application.”
Drag the application icon to your dock, and then click it. You’ll see the media browser come up. Select what photos you want to resize, and then click “Choose.” This will save the resized photo to the folder you chose in the workflow creation process.
Now your photos are resized for your convenience. Never again will you be forced to laboriously slave over resizing images.