Droplets For The Lazy

Photoshop can make easy work of your batch processing with Droplets. This tutorial explains how EASY it is to get going.

Batch processing. Doing the same thing repeatedly in the same way. People don’t seem to know that Photoshop can do this, and how easy it is. Droplets can solve your batch processing problems easily.

In order to use a Photoshop Droplet, you have to use an Action. What’s an action? It’s basically a script of automated commands that Photoshop follows. For this example, I’m going to use a very popular action: resizing a group of photos.

The first step is going to be creating the Action. Make sure your Action Palette is open. If not, go [Window > Actions] or [Alt+F9]. Click on the [New Action Set] button in the Actions palette, just so your action easier to find later. Name it whatever you want, I try to name it as detailed as possible to what it is, since I lack a “memory.”

Click on the [Create New Action] button. Name it whatever you want, I suggest keeping the similar naming scheme stated before. Click [Record]. You’ll be able to tell that the Action is recording by the little red button on the bottom of the Actions Palette. From now on, everything you do will be recorded by Photoshop. Then secretly emailed to your mom (j/k).

Since I’m going to be resizing this massive image into a smaller, more friendly format for sharing with all of my e-friends, I’m going to go under [Image > Image Size]. I’m changing my image size from 2160×1440 to 640×480. That’s right 480. Ok, it’s not 480, it’s 427, even though I named that Action otherwise. I’m not changing the resolution because I’m going to save it out as a JPEG, which is automatically converted to 72dpi. After I click OK, you can see that that [Image Resize] was recorded in the Actions Palette.

Now go to [File > Save As]. You can leave the directory as the current directory. Append something to the end of the file name. I’m using “_small.” The JPEG dialog box will pop-up, since I’m saving as JPEG. I set the quality to 8. Not too crappy, and not too large of a file size. Click OK and close the image.

Now you can stop your Action recording. Click on the square Stop Recording button next to the Record Button on the Actions Palette.

Now to create the Droplet. This part gets a little complicated, because there’s a lot of different settings. The best advice I can give is to play around. I’ll show you my method, but ultimately, you’ll end up developing your own. Anyways, onward and upward.

Go under [File > Automate > Create Droplet]. The dialog box will open. Click the [Choose] button. The Save dialog box will open. Choose the directory, or wherever you want to put your Droplet file. Name it accordingly also.

Under Set: choose the Action Set you made.
Under Action: choose the Action you made.

Then click on the two checkboxes: [Suppress File Open Options Dialog] and [Suppress Color Profile Warnings].

Where it says Destination: choose Folder. The [Choose] button will appear now. Click on that and in the dialog box that opens, select a folder you want to use. I set it up to use as a temporary folder. So I made a folder called “Resize.” I also configured my options as you can see below.

You now have a Droplet file. All you have to do is navigate to the file on your computer, not in Photoshop, then just drag-and-drop whatever image files you want to resize onto the Droplet icon. Photoshop will open, process through your images, then save the resized images to the folder you specified.

You can use this for any Action that you make in Photoshop.