Need help with a Photoshop droplet

[shmokes]

I know next to nothing about Photoshop, which seems strange because I know computers very well and was, until very recently a network admin for the past eight years.  But my wife's a graphic designer so I've just never had any motivation to learn it.  I mean, I always tell myself I'm going to sit down and spend some time with it, but since I've got her, I always put that off and instead say, "Hey . . . baby, can take the french fry out of my hand in this photo for me?"  Anyway, that's just useless history.  I need something now that my wife doesn't know how to do, and I can almost always count on someone here to know the answer.

I've just set up a photogallery on my website (with help from here, of course  ), and I've got a script that will prepare huge groups of pictures and create thumbnails for them, so I can just FTP the whole lot to the server, rather than having to upload them one-by-one though the web-gallery's admin utility.  That's all fine, but the pictures from the various digital cameras that are going up on this site run anywhere from 2-5 MB apiece which is, of course, way overkill for a web photogallery, and will also make the pages load much slower.  So the pics need resized.  My wife can make a droplet for me that will let me just drop an entire folder full of pictures into and it will resize all of them automatically, but she says that she runs into some problems with portrait vs. landscape pictures.  Apparently the droplet is like a script that runs a series of actions one at a time.  So her first resizing action might be to change the width to 640 pixels and then next will change the height to 480.  But, apparently, Photoshop is smart and when it opens a picture that was taken in portrait orientation it will automatically rotate it 90 degrees, before the droplet has a chance to resize the photo.  So the droplet is suddenly changing the wrong dimensions. I suppose one workaround would be to separate all the portrait and landscape photos into separate folders, but that would be annoying and time-consuming, and I assume there is a much better solution.

Any help?  Should I even be using Photoshop?  Are there any little freeware apps specifically made for batch resizing photos that I should be aware of?  Even if so, I suppose my wife would appreciate knowing how to fix her problem in Photoshop, since her life practically revolves around Photoshop and Quark.

[lcddream]

not sure about the droplet but picassa made by google can resize images, maybe it will work better for you...

[billf]

I use a freeware program called Easy Thumbnails.  Check it out.  It may be something you can use.

[Mamed for life]

Hi,

How about, instead of changing the dimensions of the image, just change the dpi (from 300 to 72)? This would vastly cut down the image size but retain the dimensions. I use this sometimes when I'm getting ready low res images for placing in web ready documents, and it can be run the same way from photoshop as the batch you currently are using.

Mfl

[shmokes]

That might be enough.  It looks like that's cutting them down by 2/3-3/4, making the range approximately 250 KB - 1.2 MB apiece.  What do you guys think?  How big do you think is acceptable for photos on a gallery page.  Do you think a bunch of 1 MB photos is okay, in terms of the gallery being pleasant to work with, and not waiting on pictures to load all the time?  I suppose I'll have to throw some test pictures up and give y'all a link so you can tell me if it seems to run pretty well.

[patrickl]

If you want to fit images in a certain maximum you should use Automate -> Fit image. You can restrain both the vertical and the horizontal size.

On the other hand, usually I restrict portrait pictures to a smaller size since otherwise they would not fit on screen. For instance in landscape I would make it be max 1024 wide (1024x768), but portrait would be 768 tall at maximum (576x768). So I would just scale it all at 768 high.

BTW don't forget to sharpen the images during or after resizing. They tend to lose sharpness when resized.

[mpm32]

Maybe Irfanview? 

[DrumAnBass]

Yah I used to use Photoshop for those web albums, but ran into some of those issues myself.

I would recommend JAlbum - http://jalbum.net/ Easy to use; lots of skins available and works really well!

[clanggedin]

I used to use a Photoshop (Imageready) droplet to batch resize and optimize images for the web. I found the Irfanview much quicker and better to use.

[xmenxmen]

Or ditch your web gallery and use Gallery or Gallery 2 for your web gallery.

http://gallery.menalto.com/

It will do all you want above plus more.