In the pre-Intel era I used the PhotoToolCM contextual menu plugin to take a selection of JPEG images in the Finder from our digital cameras and quickly resize them to send as e-mail attachments. Here's a way to do the same with Automator.
One of the great things about having your photos in iPhoto is the Email button that lets you choose a selection to resize and send as e-mail attachments:
Unfortunately it takes some time for my photos to get into iPhoto, since I sort them using Adobe Bridge (part of CS2) and import them to iPhoto after processing. But, as when you've just got back from a holiday, there are times when you want to quickly fire off a few (unprocessed) snaps to friends and/or family. Here is a basic Automator workflow for batch duplicating, renaming, and resizing a selection of JPEG images in a Finder folder (or selected directly on the CF/SD/XD/whatever card mounted on the desktop), ready to be sent as e-mail attachments. Output to the desktop at 25% of the original dimensions is my personal preference:
If you choose Save As Plug-in in Automator you can right-click on your image selection to perform the resize action:
If you want to use or customize this workflow, you can download it here. Open it, choose Save As Plug-in, name it, choose Plug-in for: Finder then Save.
The downside is the resultant resized images are not compressed enough and are still way too large (in file size) than they would be had I resized them with an external application.
I use Resize! to batch resize AND compress images. Apple seems to have forgotten the compression side of things.
Still, I use Automator regularly for other stuff and it really is a cool way to get dross things done.
:)
Thanks Hrududu; Resize! is an old app (dated 2004), so I'm not sure it is seeing any active development. Oddly Apple includes an Automator action to compress the images within the passed PDF files, but not images alone.
Thanks for this post, it helped me a lot. I post to blogs using apple mail and the postie plugin of wordpress. It works great except image resizing. So this post just comes in handy.
About image size, After your SCALE IMAGES action, you can add a CHANGE TYPE OF IMAGES action, which allow you to switch to JPEG. I have noticed improvements of about 40% in file size.
My 5c.