Applescript and Photoshop Thumbnail Generator

I'm not sure how many computer geeks read this blog, but just in case there are, hopefully you'll find this useful. (Note: you'll need a Mac and Adobe's Photoshop¹.)

In my work, I sometimes need to resize a bunch of images for web photo galleries. If you have ever done that, you know how tedious it can be. Thankfully, Photoshop and Fireworks² both have batch editing functionality, and it usually does the trick.

Then, recently I learned about Apple's built-in Automator³, and got excited about customizing my batch processes. But, even though Automator did the trick, (and with the help of these scripts⁴, I was able to do more with Photoshop), I needed something more specific, with more customization.

Well, Automator is just a bunch of AppleScript⁵, right? So why not just learn a little AppleScript and make my own script to resize images exactly how I need? That's what I've done. Right now it can resize images (only JPEGs) in three ways — proportional by width, longest side, and square. And it takes advantage of Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature, which is great for getting high quality images in small file sizes. In the future I will add support for renaming options.

Edit: I moved the script information to this page⁶.