Gabriel Ponzanelli Photography

Often I need to resize a bunch of images to upload to a website or to send via email to family and friends. Sometimes opening up an application like Photoshop or Aperture feels like using a Plasma Rifle to kill a cockroach (apologies for the super geeky reference, I've been playing a lot of Fallout lately).

Anyway, there are a ton of paid and free applications out there that let you do this. I've tried pretty much all of them and they also seem like overkill for such a simple task. Even opening up Preview is slow and requires a bunch of steps. This morning I was thinking about it and I thought I'd play with Automator and see if I could create a little app that did exactly that. Within 20 minutes and a couple of tests I had it. Automator rules.

I thought I'd share it with everyone in case you're looking for something like this. If you download it, please keep in mind that I'm sharing this out of goodwill and I cannot guarantee it will work in your system. It works fine in my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. A quick rundown of what it does:

Double-click on the app and a window will open asking which photos you want to resize:

Choose as many as you need and click OK. Then the next dialogue box will ask you where you want to copy the items to so you have a duplicate instead of replacing the originals.

Finally, it'll ask you what size you want the final ones to be.

And that's it. Depending on how many photographs you selected it may take a little while, but you'll get all your images in the size you wanted, and for free!

You can download the app as a .zip file from here.