Question about resizing pics.
 

OK, this may or may not belong on the newbie board, but I will give it a shot.

As far as I know, I have been told that free site pic sizes should be about 50K and should be about 600 pixels on the long side in order to get accepted to most free site listings.

Is that correct?

In addition, instead of having to resize hundreds of pics, I am wondering if anyone here using a pic program that will let you resize a bunch of pics at once?


Any help is appreciated.

Yep, those numbers are pretty good. I'll even make the pixel size a bit larger if I can keep the weight down to a reasonable level. Some images compress better than others, but generally I try to keep everything between 40-60k.

There are quite a few image compression programs that do batch processing...I use Ulead Smartsaver and SuperJPG. Again, depends on the images as to which one does a better job. Don't think SuperJPG is available any longer, but you should still be able to find Ulead.

As MrYum said that is correct - and I use Arles for my resizing needs and it works like a charm - you can specify that the pics needs to be say 600 or 650 on the longside and it will resize it and keep the aspect ratio :)

http://www.digitaldutch.com/arles/

Photoshop actions is the best way for me without any doubts
Here is an example
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/it/guides/batchresize.html

Side question for people who use Arles.

What settings do you generally run for thumbs? Sometimes when I'm making thumbs from high quality pics(+1mB), they come out kinda pixelized.

|pink SI, thank you SO much for that link! I've been cropping thumbs for the last 8 hours, and manually resizing every last one of the originals. And cursing myself for not knowing how to batch it in PS. That tutorial was the first one that actually made sense to me! Just cut my work down by a third - thanks again!! |headbang| |blowkiss|

Thanks for all the responses, that helps a lot. Now my only decision is between Photoshop and Arles.

Again, thanks.

BTW: I had forgotten that I downloaded a copy of Arles to evaluate a few days ago. I am having some trouble resizing the images. I am able to produce thumbnails. I am sure it is something I am doing wrong.

Photoshop has a trial version as well. I will try them both and purchase whichever one works best for me.

Really... I use to do it that way. Photoshop is awesome..!!!

You can also use the actions in Fireworks or get a prog called pictureshark http://www.picture-shark.com/ it can watermark the pictures as well and it's free!

I just checked and all of my saved Arles files use Lanczos 3 with Sharpen filter at 75%. I've done about 400,000 thumbs using Arles and so far no complaints.

I set up actions on Photoshop to resize my images and watermark them at the same time! Works great, only issue is that I have to set up two sets of actions, one for vertical pics and one for horizontal pics.

I still have SuperJPG available on my old downloads page:
http://www.webmastersguide.com/?downloads.htm

Also available there is the very first batch resize
program ever made for Windows, to the best of my knowledge.
It's a program I had written back in 1997 when
we were all making each thumbnail BY HAND.
Later we also added the ability to generate HTML
for thumbnail pages to the software,
which was revolutionary at the time. :)
It's amazing how far technology has come.