April 12, 2004

Curious George: Batch Processes in Photoshop I'm having trouble getting Photoshop (7) to do what I want it to do. Damn Photoshop.

Right, what I have is a folder, with many, many subfolders, filled with about 1GB of pictures. Now all I want to do is save each image for the web, and save it over itself. I need to retain the folder structure, and the file names. I could just go through each folder, at worst, but theres about 100 of them, or more. The trouble is, I can get it to go through the folders, and save each image for the web, but it wants to save them all to the same folder. I can't seem to get it to just save each image in its original position. Does that make any sense? And is there any solution? I'm sure there must be, obviously, and I'm just missing it like a fool.

posted by dng 20 years ago
  • Did you select 'save and close' from the 'destination' section of the batch window? Run a test on a smaller set first, but it should work...haven't run batches in a while, but I don't remember having this problem.
  • What format are the original files? If they are not web ready (.psd, .pct, .bmp etc) Photoshop will not save over the original, but create duplicates. The easiest way that I know - if all you are doing is "webifying" them, not resizing/modifying and you want to batch to the same optimization settings for all of you images - is to create a droplet in ImageReady. It ships with photoShop, so you should have it. Open a file in Imageready Open your optimization palette Modify the settings to your liking. Click the arrow to the right of the optimization palette/drag the arrow onto your desktop You should have a droplet. Drag & Drop your images folder on top of the droplet Go make yourself a sandwich - this will take a while. This should get all the images in all of the sub-folders and maintain your hierarchy. If you want to use PhotoShop batch or droplet, choose save and close from the destination pull-down. PhotoShop will save the files in the same directory it found them in.
  • Now you're sure you don't have enough free space to just save for web and then cut/paste back over the originals? Even if you did it in 100mb chunks or something...
  • Ah, the subfolders are tricky. Sorry I missed that.
  • I'll try those tomorrow. Thanks.