Drop it.... Photoshop

Automatically photoshop your pictures, automate your droplets!

We quite often get questions about our thumbnail plugin from professional photographers. They want to do "bla bla bla" with their pictures... I don't even own a camera anymore - I am a Dinosaur in these days I guess. Most people are happy to have a task to reduce the size of a picture, some need more....

101 % flexibility

Did you know that WatchDirectory can start Batch files? - do you know what batch files are???

Did you know Photoshop can create "droplets"? Do you know what droplets are???
(actually, I didn't - someone told me)

Did you know the above makes sense, and actually can work together?

Ok, so you already know Photoshop. You can manipulate a picture "the way you want it", but it is a tedious, boring job to do with Photoshop for every single picture... You just want to do "the same thing" for every new picture....

Lets Automate (yeah!) First, you need to create a droplet in Photoshop, here is a google search for you to get the finer details: clickerdiclick The first link at the time of writing was Automate Your Favorite Photoshop Routines. Basically, a droplet is a kind of macro (action) you create in photoshop. You save this droplet on your disk somewhere (for example C:\Bin\MyDroplets\Smaller.exe) and when you drop a picture on it, it will automagically run all your tedious tasks.

Did you create your droplet? ok, now we will automate further by letting WatchDirectory automatically "drop" new pictures on your perfect droplet.

Create a new file called, for example, C:\droplets\mydroplet.bat, with notepad and make sure it has a .bat file extension! (do NOT use editors like Word for this, they add rubbish to the file that is NOT compatible with these scripts). The bat file should have the following line:

"C:\Bin\MyDroplets\Smaller.exe" "%WD_FILE%"

The above will start your droplet (smaller.exe in this example) on the new file detected by WatchDirectory! Use the Start a Batch File task to start this script.

If you want to remove the original file after this droplet did its thing, you should use this batch file:

"C:\Bin\MyDroplets\Smaller.exe" "%WD_FILE%"
DEL "%WD_FILE%"

Coming next - use ImageMagick with WatchDirectory