One Click Image Resizing on OS X With Preview and Automator

Problem
Well. As you can see I’ve been making screenshots lately, and, as always, putting a large picture in a blog is a bad idea. My normal process was to drag it into photoshop, resize it to around 30% and save a copy. Thats a major waste of time considering the Photoshop startup isn’t exactly lightning on this laptop.

Solution
After some digging around, I found a nice article from John’s Blog on using automator for this task. Surprisingly, it is easy to do – just a few steps to save you countless seconds of Photoshop splash-screen torture.

How-To

Fire up Automator
Under the Applications list, choose Finder
Under the Finder actions list, choose Get Selected Finder Items
Under the Applications list, choose Preview
Under the Preview actions list, choose Scale Images
Select ‘Show Actions When Run’ under the Options drop-down
Save as a Plug-In

(Click for larger size)

Usage
Take a quick screenshot (cmd-shift-3). Now, currently it is setup so that it will resize the original file. I like this since it gives me control of how I want to manipulate the image — for example, if I need a thumbnail I can simply option-drag to copy, and resize.

Right-click the ‘Picture X’ and under the Automator menu you should see your Automator plug-in. Click that, and viola! Done.

(Dialog that pops up)