How to Batch Resize in Photoshop
While it’s relatively easy to write an Action to resize a series of images in Photoshop, it’s easier still to get Photoshop to do all the work for you. Photoshop comes with an image processor script that will open, resize and save a series of images for you – very quickly.
Step 1
Choose File > Scripts > Image Processor. The image processor dialog shows a simple four-step process for resizing the images.

Step 2
In Step 1 of the dialog, select to either resize the images already open in Photoshop (if you have them open), or click Select Folder and select a folder of images to resize. Select Include all Subfolders to include all subfolders of the selected folder.
Step 3
In Step 2 of the dialog select where to save the images. If you select Save in Same Location Photoshop creates a subfolder in which to save the images so you don’t have to worry about overwriting them. If a subfolder by the same name already exists with images with the same names in it, Photoshop saves to that folder but adds a sequential number to the file so you still won’t lose your files. Alternatively, you can select a different folder for the resized images.

Step 4
In Step 3 of the dialog select the file type to save in. For the web Save as JPEG is the obvious choice. Set a Quality value in the range 0 to 12 where 12 is the highest quality and 0 the lowest. For better color on the web, select Convert profile to sRGB and ensure that Include ICC Profile at the foot of the dialog is checked so the profile will be saved with the image.

To resize the images, select the Resize to Fit checkbox and then set the desired maximum width and height for the final image. For example, if you type 300 for the width and 300 for the height, the image will be resized so that the longest side of any image, whether it be in portrait or landscape orientation will be 300 pixels. The images are scaled in proportion so they won’t be skewed out of shape.
The Width and Height measurements do not have to be the same so you could, for example, specify a Width of 400 and a Height of 300 and no image will have a width greater than 400 or a height greater than 300.
Step 5
If desired you can save in another format as well by selecting its checkbox so you can save the same image in different formats and at different sizes in the one process. You can also select to run an Action on the images, if desired.
When you’re ready, click Run and the images will be automatically opened (if they are not already open), resized, saved and closed.
To see your resized images, choose File > Open and navigate to the folder that you specified the images to be saved to. If you chose to save as JPEG, the images will be in a subfolder called JPEG, for PSD in a folder called PSD and so on.
So whenever you need to resize a lot of images for uploading to the web, for example, the Photoshop Image Processor script makes the job almost painless.







40 Responses to “How to Batch Resize in Photoshop” - Add Yours
June 9th, 2009 at 4:35 am
I really can’t understand why use such advanced program for such simple operatons. It can be done equally good and much easier with different software. I personnaly use and recommend FastStone freeware application – Photo Resizer, or if you also want an image browser – Image Viewer.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:42 am
Hi Helen,
this is very useful, but is there an option to set ppi/dpi values for the resized images?
Thanks
June 9th, 2009 at 4:57 am
Thank you so much for your nice tutorial. I was wondering it so much. I hope it’d be a a better alternative for the other batch resizing softwares.
Emre.
June 9th, 2009 at 6:17 am
Lukhasz:
I’m going to venture a guess here and say that I believe Adobe’s algorithms for saving files out to .jpegs are probably a bit more advanced than something you’re going to find in any freeware program. Anything you do to a jpeg image is going to deteriorate the quality in some way. While the sacrifice in image quality may not be noticeable, I’d prefer to leave my image processing up to the folks at Adobe rather than some freeware developer who threw together a program in their spare time..
But that’s just me.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Awesome tutorial! I only have one issue. I’m currently using CS3 and there doesn’t appear to be an option to include the subfolders. Is that exclusive to CS4? Disappointing if it is, I have all my photos sorted by date with Lightroom and if I have to pick each one individually it will be really disappointing.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Thank you, I was going to write an action to resize and save 500 wedding photos! This will work very well!
June 9th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I really wish I’d seen this last night!
June 9th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Agree with Marcus – resizing does lead to quality loss. I use either PSE or Capture NX (which does a really god job in my opinion).
@viktor – you don’t usually need to worry about dpi, it’s just the number of pixels that matter for most applications.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Knipps, if you have all your images in Lightroom, then perhaps you’d be better off doing the resizing from inside Lightroom? I’ll put together a post on this in the next week or two for you.
And yes, you’re right in saying that Photoshop CS3 lacks the “Include Subfolders” option which is included in Photoshop CS4.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:03 am
i use http://www.multipleimageresizer.net/
June 12th, 2009 at 1:31 am
Thank you so much for sharing this system. I know Photoshop can do so much, but without specific directions it can be very diffucult to figure it out.
That was simple and I plan to use it! I usually go into Picasa just to resize for the internet because it is so user friendly.
Thank You!
June 12th, 2009 at 2:27 am
very very neat.wonderful presentation.
June 12th, 2009 at 3:37 am
This was one of the most useful and practical PhotoShop tutorials I read in a long time. I just did a shoot with about 600 photos, and edited that down to 60 for post processing. The batch conversion rendered the onerous task of down sizing each photo from about a minute each to less than a minute for the entire batch. Thanks for this. It was great.
June 12th, 2009 at 8:31 am
I may be missing something here, but I go to “FILE” then down to “PROCESS MULTIPLE FILES” then follow the prompts. very simple, very quick, you don’t even need to open your photos prior to starting. One hint though, it will process ALL the photos in the folder you select, so if you only want to do a few, move them to a temp folder first. ( I use Windows Explorer).
Cheers.
Ross Campbell.
June 12th, 2009 at 8:32 am
may be missing something here, but I go to “FILE” then down to “PROCESS MULTIPLE FILES” then follow the prompts. very simple, very quick, you don’t even need to open your photos prior to starting. One hint though, it will process ALL the photos in the folder you select, so if you only want to do a few, move them to a temp folder first. ( I use Windows Explorer).
Cheers.
Ross Campbell.
June 12th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I’d love to see an article on Batch resizing in Lightroom 2 or Photoshop Elements. I’m not using Photoshop these days and Lightroom 2 is great.
Thank you so much.
June 12th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Very neat and useful ! Thanks a lot !
Werner
June 13th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Great article. I’ve been using another program to resize but will try this method. Thanks, Teri in Costa Rica
June 13th, 2009 at 3:02 am
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
-SO MUCH EASIER AND LESS PAINFUL THAN BATCHING!!
June 18th, 2009 at 6:43 am
Thank you for that great tutorial this will be handy for my holiday pictures.
I just have a wee question – my photos come in at 3872×2592 pixels – if I want to resize them say to have them processed at say Costco what size do I make them so they are printable as a 4×6 print? And what DPI do I choose?
June 18th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Hi there Diane
I just checked Costco site for you. They require a minimum 690 x 460 for 4 x 6 printing which suggests they are working at around 115 dpi as a minimum size. I suggest you could probably make them anything more than this and up to 300 dpi and they’d accept them.
To calculate size, at 300 dpi for example, multiply width and height by 300 so, for a 5 x 7 you would need:
(5 x 300) x (7 x 300) image which is 1500 x 2100 pixels.
Do make sure to crop to the same overall ratio eg 5:7 for a 5 x 7 print because your native format isn’t in this same ratio so, if you don’t crop the photo, Costco will do this and you won’t have any control over what is removed.
You will find most programs let you specify the ratio of width to height and the resolution. In Photoshop, click the Crop tool, set the Width in the tool bar to 7in the height to 5in (or vice versa) set the resolution to 300 dpi and drag over the image to crop to this resolution and size.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Many thanks for that. I spent an hour resizing images the other day. lol
August 11th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I have used Photoshop for a myriad of things but I NEVER knew it could do this. I arrived here from a search because I had this huge folder of stuff I wanted cut down but the thought of doing it one by one was just out of the question. I popped open Google and I found your site. AMAZING HOW TO!!!
Thank you thank you thank you !!!
September 5th, 2009 at 5:28 am
One of my big complaints about GIMP is the lack of a batch processor like this, but I found a great GIMP equivalent here:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
September 26th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Dear Helen
according which version do you give the tutorial lectures. In my phohoshop I can not find Image processor in Scripts – step 1 .
Thanks for your reply.
Mary
September 27th, 2009 at 3:57 am
Thanks for this. I had tried to batch process the images (500+) but kept getting the colour profile dialogue box coming up on opening the image. This sorted it out nicely!
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:53 am
Dear Helen,
thank you for that great tutorial ! I had a lot of photos and googling how to rersize them at once in PS CS found your excellent lecture! Thanks! God Bless you :)
November 1st, 2009 at 7:31 am
Mary:
If you go to the bottom of there is a option that expands the list and show you the option. Maybe someone else can enlighten us as to why it hides some stuff in a lot of the lists.
November 30th, 2009 at 12:06 am
you tutorial saved my life! THANKS ALOT! :D
December 31st, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Thank you for this tutorial – you just solved a mystery for me. The sRGB profile was never saving with my file when I resized using this method … Now I know how important the Save ICC Profile check box is. Something so simply just saved me lots of time. Thanks again!!
December 31st, 2009 at 1:59 pm
this is awesome, its just what i needed! i have used lightroom 2 to resize, but this is soooooo much better!
you are truly a life saver!
January 1st, 2010 at 2:55 am
Mary – a superb tutorial! I have used Actions previously, which were much more complex.
Thanks
Bill
January 1st, 2010 at 3:38 am
Thanks a lot.
It very helpful.
Tony Tam
January 2nd, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Great tutorial!
I had no idea it could be this easy to re-size in Photoshop This will defenetively speed up my work process.
Thanks a lot.
Helen
January 4th, 2010 at 10:21 am
thank you very much for this how to guide. I only wish this was done before i did all my wedding photos, and a few other friends wedding photos…:P oh well, at lest now i know something new and great about Photoshop and it will be coming in handy again in a few days time
Thanks again :)
Tanya
January 16th, 2010 at 4:03 am
Did not know PS could do that, and so easily too. Thank U so much.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:16 am
Dear Helen,
I tried to resize a batch of jpeg images in CS4 using the Image Processor script, but it failed. I went through recording of open, resize, save, and close actions, and every time I et the message “sorry I could not process the following image” – and the list of all images in my folder.
The resizing I’m after is actually a resolution change: I have my images at 72 pixels/inch, and I want to increase that to 300 p/in. At the same time, I have to keep my “Resample Image” clicked off, or my files would get really large (something to the tune of 19200×14600 pixels). Keeping resampling off, I get the resolution at 300 p/in, overall size stays at 4752×3168 pixels and picture dimensions change to something around 15 x 10 inches – that’s precisely the result I want, but I somehow can’t get it done by a batch.
What am I missing? Any ideas?
January 28th, 2010 at 6:08 am
Final someone who know what there talking about.
Thank you
February 7th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. This is what I have been looking for a long time. Many Thanks
February 9th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Amazing! I was actually wondering how to do that on photoshop! Thanks
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