Schwippy

Making Thumbnails Automatically in Photoshop

If you have a folder full of images and want to post them to a web page somehow, you’ll probably want to size them down some way or another. You actually have a few options for doing so too, such as uploading to flickr or another photo site and have it automatically done for you, or you could download some batch photo tool dedicated specifically to making thumbnails. But if you have Adobe Photoshop, why not use its great built in re-sampling algorithms and have the batch feature do it all for you?

The following tutorial will show you how to do just that. After this walk through, you will have a folder full of all your original images turned into thumbnail sized images.

Step 1: Find the Actions Pallet

After opening Photoshop, what your going to need to find is your Actions pallet. If it isn’t immediately visible on your screen, you can make it pop up by going to these menus: Window > Actions.

Step 2: Add Some Resizing Actions

Adding your own custom actions is an extremely simple process. Basically all you need to do is tell Photoshop to watch what you do, and remember it. So what we need to do is, on that actions pallet, lets click the Folder Button at the bottom. This is going to create a new folder for us to play around in. You can call this folder anything you want, but for this tutorial (and possibly more later) lets go ahead and call it Tutorials. After you press enter, you should now have a new folder called Tutorials, but with nothing in it. So lets put some stuff in it! Lets now add the entire script that will handle our image resizing process. Go ahead and click the New Action button.

Lets name this new action something informative that you can use later, such as Make Thumbnail.

After naming it, click the Record button. This will add your new action to the Tutorials folder and also start the recording process. When an action is recording, it is watching every step in Photoshop you do and adding it to the action. So, say for example, you applied a filter right now. The filter application would get recorded, and at any time in the future, you could simply double click that action with any image open in Photoshop and it would apply that filter with the exact same settings you used.

Lets start recording exactly what we want to do now. First we need to Open an image. It really doesn’t matter what image, since we are just showing Photoshop what we want to do. The specific images will be put into the batch process in a later step. As soon as you open an image, you should notice that a new action appeared inside your Make Thumbnail action definition; Open. New actions will appear every time we complete a process until we click the stop button.

Lets continue by now resizing our image we just opened. Go to the image menu, then image size. (Image > Image Size…). In the menu that popped up, make sure that constrain proportions is checked. Go ahead and put in a common width that you want all your thumbnails to be. In this example, I’m going to use 150 pixels. Leave the height to whatever it changes to. As long as constrain proportions is checked, it should be fine.

Click OK. You should now have a very small thumbnail of your original image on your screen. Now we have to save this image somewhere. It really doesn’t even matter where you save the file, simply because once we start the batch process, the saving part will get overridden with a set destination. So just ahead and save the file ANYWHERE you want. (Just don’t overwrite the file you opened…. unless you want to)

Once you saved the file, Close the image.

Now you should have a blank Photoshop. Go ahead and look at your actions pallet. Your’s should resemble mine:

If you have Open, Image Size, Save, and Close all listed, then you’re good to go! Now, simply hit the Stop Button . Its immediately to the left of the red record button on the actions pallet. You just created your thumbnail creation script.

Step 3: Start the Batch Process

Go to the File menu, then Automate, then Batch… (File > Automate > Batch…)

Upon getting to the Batch dialog, we want to change a few settings, but first, make sure that you have the right stuff selected: the Set needs to be the folder you created earlier, Tutorials in this case. The Action should be set to the new action we made, Make Thumbnail for our project.

In the next section, our Source should be set to Folder. Right below, is a button that says Choose…. Click the button. This will open a file and folder dialog, asking you what folder to use. Select the folder that has all your images that you want to make thumbnails in it.

Make sure you select the next box, Override Action “Open” Commands. What this does, is whenever it sees that we opened a file, it doesn’t ask us what file to open, but instead, it keeps opening files in the specified folder.

On the Destination drop-down, make sure to select Folder. Now below that, click Choose and select a destination folder that you want all your thumbnails to be output to. (I made a new folder for this, but you can use the same folder as long as you make each thumbnail have a different name - defined below)

Make sure Override Action “Save As” Command is checked. This will save each file by a set of rules we are making right now, instead of asking us how to save it on each file.

In the following drop-downs, you can leave them as they are, or you can customize them any way you want. In the second box, i typed _thumbnail and changed the 3rd box to extension. This will result in the files being saved like: OriginalName_thumbnail.jpg

Now just click OK!

As soon as you click OK, Photoshop will start opening all your images, one at a time, and instantly resizing them down to 150 pixels (or whatever size you chose earlier), then saving them where you told it to. It sure is a lot faster than doing it manually, wouldn’t you agree?

Best Dock Ever.

When it comes to peripheral docks, usually you don’t get that much choice in terms of customization. Chris decided he didn’t like that. At all.

He made himself a dock out of Legos! Its actually 3 docks in one. Chris can hook up his Pocket PC, get some more tunes on his iPod, and charge his Nintendo DS all at once.The site is just a Picasa web album, so I can’t verify it, but it seems that he most likely has a USB hub tucked under there to tie it all to one usb cable and one power cable. And if you look on the side there, it looks like theres a spare USB port for just about anything else you could think of putting in there.

The dock looks good. Almost perfect. It seems as though the iPod dock was meant to be there. Theres no doubt that this took quite a few re-building to get it just right. Good job Chris! I definatly wouldn’t mind having this up on my desk next to my monitor.

Lego Dock Web Album [Via Engadget]

DIY Peeps

We all love peeps, Right?

Well, ok…. maybe we all just like sticking them in the microwave. But that aside, heres an awesome little tutorial on making your own peeps, done by the minds over at Evil Mad Scientist. Clicky clicky on the linky linky.

Make Your Own Peeps @ EvilMadScientist

Top 10 used passwords

ModernLifeIsRubbish has obtained an up-to-date top 10 list of currently used passwords online.

I’m willing to bet that you’ve used one or more of these passwords online before. I know that I have used ‘qwerty’ on more than one occasion for throw-away accounts or for shady sites that I fear I may be in danger of personal information theft.

Just one more note, the list was compiled across the pond, so obviously, there are going to be different numbers if we were to take a poll here in the states. For example, our favorite team probably wouldnt include Liverpool

Click the link to check it out

Top 10 Most Common Passwords

Get rid of Coinstar’s Commission

If you’ve ever walked into a supermarket within the past 10 years or so, you’ve probably seen a Coinstar change counter.

They are the devices that let you take a jar full of change, dump it all in there, get a receipt, then take that receipt up to a register and trade it in for some cold cash. So far so good, right? Well, now step in evil corporations.

According to Coinstar, they need to charge you a percentage of your cash just to be able to dump it into a machine. Last time I checked, it was free to do this in any casino in Las Vegas.

In my area, Coinstar charges you 8.5% of however much change you have. Thats not cool with me.

And apparently, it wasnt cool with other people either. It seems that Coinstar heard about the fact that they are evil, so they tried changing some things around. They now give the coin holder the option to either get cash with the percentage taken out the same way they have been, or they can choose to completely bypass that percentage commission and elect to instead receive a gift card. If you select a gift card, the machine will ask you where you want the gift card to be used at. You actually get some good choices here too. Places like iTunes online store, Amazon.com, Target, and many others.

The whole gift card idea made me have an entirely different opinion on the evil Coinstar company (Yes, I still think they are evil).

Recently I read about a way to totally confuse the Coinstar machine and pretty much combine the two methods of monetary trade. Basically what it lets you do, is get cash with no commission taken out!

YES! Best of both worlds right there.

Its a very simple way of doing it, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Heres the steps of getting your cash without paying the percentage for it.

1. Start the Coinstar machine.
2. Tell it you want to trade coins for a gift card.
3. Select a gift card. It doesnt matter what one, you wont be getting it anyways.
4. Give it your hard earned couch coins.
5. Discretely go around back and unplug the telephone wire
6. Wait a few minutes while it keeps trying to dial, then finally gives up.
7. Watch it give you a receipt to bring to the register and get cash.

What we effectively did here was disable all communication the machine has with its central servers. This makes it unable to put funds into a new gift card for you.

After it decides that the connection just wont work, it gives you the cash receipt. Since you never selected that you wanted cash, it never had a chance to ask you if you agreed to the condition that it charges you a percentage!

Without your consent, the machine cant take anything out of your money.

Now go cash in that receipt and buy some baseball cards….. or whatever it is you kids are spending your money on these days.

[Via Zedomax]

Restart? Never!

Don’t you hate this little guy?

No matter what you tell it, it just wont leave you alone, will it? You can click ‘Restart Later’, but if your a regular windows user, you know damn well that that wont do much good. The dialog just comes back after 3 minutes.

What Ive been doing is dragging it to the bottom right of the screen all the way off the desktop, so that just a little bit of the top left of the dialog is showing.

That seems to work pretty good, but it still bugs me. In the back of my mind, I still know its right there waiting for me. GUH.

Well, thankfully, I just found a nice little command that will get rid of it. If you ever want to totally get rid of the dialog without having to worry about it popping back up and taunt you later, simply open your Run box, or get to a command line and just enter this command:

sc stop wuauserv

That should get rid of the current dialog, the system tray icon, and also make it so it wont come back up again.

Just one more tip…. dont forget to restart the system! Ha.

[Via Digital Inspiration]

The Prioritizer

So I came across this awesome online calculator that lets you ‘get your priorities straight’, as my ex girlfriend would often tell me to do.

Its marketed off as a financial calculator, but whats great is that you can use it for anything that you need to plot.

Lets take the example I used to check it out. When people ask me something like ‘What’s your favorite soda?’, I just usually say I dont have a favorite. Lets say i actually want to see what soda i really do prefer over all the others. Thats where this calculator comes into play.

All I have to do it give it a list of all the items I want prioritized. In this case, Root beer, Doctor Peeper, Splite, Sierra Myst, Cherry Cook, and Pipse.

After i enter all my choices, up to 15, it then proceeds to ask me which I prefer over another. In other words, a complete boolean approach to the entire situation.

Depending on how many items are put in, The Prioritizer will keep asking questions until every item has been compared to every other item. In my case above, it had 2 of the above screens i had to fill out (on 2 pages).

Once you have completed the comparisons, you get a result page with a ranking of all your comparisons on it, showing you what is most important to you.

For my example above, It shows me that Root beer is the number one position on my favorites, while Doctor Peeper is the least favorite.

Like I said above, this was intentionally intended as a financial calculator, so you could of course use it to prioritize financial situations like home mortgage payments, car payments, and the what not….. but wheres the fun in not being able to decide what color to dye your cat?

The Prioritizer [ Via Lifehacker]

Learn to Speed Read

Ive always been interested in speed reading…. i just never knew exactly how. I knew there were a few tricks to use, like you just simply cant say the words in your head if you wanna go fast. It just wont work.

Ive never really tried to look up techniques for speed reading, but i did just happen to come across this guy’s site. He seems to know his stuff and has some tips about it. Its worth a nice slow read anyways

Double Your Reading Rate [Via Lifehacker]