There are many reason to resize images, among those reasons are it saves space and makes uploading go faster. Large images are great for their high resolutions, they aren’t as good when you want to upload your photos to Facebook.

Automator, if you’ve never used it before is a very powerful application that is heavily underused. This tutorial will show a few ways how Automator can be used to resize images.

 

Resize as a Finder Service

batch resize images automator service

Of all the batch resizing methods listed in this article, this method is probably the most practical and easy to use. To use it all you have to do is select a group or images (or single image) and then from the menu bar click Finder -> Services -> Resize.

You can download it…

[wpdm_file id=9]

 

Or create it yourself, here’s how:

  1. Open Automator (Applications folder) and when asked to “Choose a type for your document:” choose Service.
  2. In the right pane, for “Service receives selected” select “files or folders” (image files also works).
  3. For application, select Finder
  4. From the left pane, select Files & Folders.
  5. Then drag “Get Selected Finder Items” from the middle pane to the right pane.
  6. Next drag over “Copy Finder Items”
  7. Drag “Scale Images” over to the right pane. (Photos -> Scale Images)

Now your right pane in Automator should look like the above image, in that order. You can now modify what Automator does:

  • In “Copy Finder Images” decide on your desired export location.
  • And most importantly, in “Scale Image” decide what size you’d like to have your images exported to.

 

Drag n’ Drop Method

batch resize image mac

The drag-n-drop method is really simple. It works like this, you drag a folder or a selection of pictures and drop them on top of this automator app. No need to open the app, just leave it on your desktop and drop images on top of it.

You can download it…

[wpdm_file id=7]

 

Or create it yourself, here’s how:

  1. Open Automator (Applications folder) and when asked to “Choose a type for your document:” choose Application.
  2. From the left pane, select Files & Folders
  3. Then drag “Get Folder Contents” from the middle pane to the right pane.
  4. Next drag over “Copy Finder Items”
  5. Drag “Scale Images” over to the right pane. (Photos -> Scale Images)

Now your right pane in Automator should look like the above image, in that order. You can now modify what Automator does:

  • In “Get Folder Contents” decide if you’d like Automator to grab every image even if they are located in a subfolder of the folder that you are dragging in.
  • In “Copy Finder Images” decide on your desired export location.
  • In “Scale Image” decide what size you’d like to have your images exported to.

 

Ask Location

automator batch resize

This method method of resizing images will open a window that you can use to navigate to the desired images and then export.

You can download it…

[wpdm_file id=8]

 

Or create it yourself, here’s how:

  1. Open Automator (Applications folder) and when asked to “Choose a type for your document:” choose Application.
  2. From the left pane, select Files & Folders
  3. Then drag “Ask for Finder Items” from the middle pane to the right pane.
  4. Next drag over “Copy Finder Items”
  5. Drag “Scale Images” over to the right pane. (Photos -> Scale Images)

Now your right pane in Automator should look like the above image, in that order. You can now modify what Automator does:

  • In “Ask for Finder Items” make sure you check “Allow Multiple Selection”. Without that you’ll have to resize images one by one instead of just selecting all the photos at once.
  • In “Copy Finder Images” decide on your desired export location.
  • In “Scale Image” decide what size you’d like to have your images exported to.

 

These above listed methods are not the only way to use Automator to resize pictures, and it’s not limited to just these functions. For instance, if you don’t want the images to be copied to a separate location, you could just remove the “Copy Finder Items” from the Automator action.

You could have it also rename your pictures while it batch resizes. You could even set it to automatically print the pictures after being resized. There are a lot of possibilities within Automator, definitely check it out.