Awesome! Today I spent a buttload of time trying to protect the images I’ve uploaded by sticking a watermark on them. Sure, NextGEN Gallery allows me to have watermarks but when it saves, it completely obliterates the exif meta data (holy tongue twister) which sucks because I plan to integrate the exif data viewer that came with NextGEN soon.

Edit:

So it’s been brought to my attention that I’m an asshole. Photoshop does do the following with this File > Automate > Fit Image function. Oh well, i still think the below is useful, but not for pure resizing. Colour me bad.. really bad.

Anyhow, I’m sure you all know about Photoshop Batches, and how shit they can be.. you know the fact that you can’t add any kind of conditional statement at all. For example: If it’s a landscape edit the width -> else it’s a potrait so resize the height. This is basically my issue because it wrecks my desired file sizes for my final output files for my galleries that I’ve been oh so diligently filling out. I googled around and found out that image ready has such conditional support; however, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to do a batch after I made the Droplet. That’s a mouthful.

From there I stumbled upon the fact that you can do some scripting in Photoshop, which then led to this guy’s handy app that totally owns. Again, it’s not perfect but it’s leaps and bounds better than not having it at all.

You just download it, extract it to the proper folder and let’r rip.

Step 1:

So, I’m not gonna explain how to make these, but you need them. They’re a bunch of steps you “record” that Photoshop will do for you later on when you hit the play button.

Step 2:

Get at it and break me off.

Step 3:

Set it up and hit OK. Easy as that.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1. It’s good to flatten the image before you save so that Photoshop doesn’t prompt you while you’re running the script. We all know how annoying it can be to sit around hitting enter and not being able to do anything else.

2. In your action, you have to do a “Save As..” command as your last item and make it save to another folder. I saved it to a folder called “web out” on my desktop, and just moved files out of there after they were finished resizing so I could use the script again with that folder for new images.

3. Make sure it’s only images in the folder you want to work with, or else it will error out. I’ve only used it with JPEG files, so I have no idea if it works with any other file format, though it should given the options it has.

Once I got used to it, it was a breeze, and now my photos are properly sized. Yay! Oh yeah, you may notice that my images have a watermark now. I don’t know, it just gives me peace of mind that there’s somewhat of a deterrent in place to prevent image stealing. Really, I’d only be pissed of someone made money off my photos and I didn’t lol. Watermarks are very similar to the steering wheel Clubs, which are the scare crows of the car jacking world.

Tags: Photoshop

This entry was posted by Will on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 2:24 am and is filed under Geek, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.