Expert: Ran - 2/10/2009

Question

"I have 500 or so images in folder A. I want to transfer these images to folder B and carry three operations on them:-

1.) Change their resolution to 256*256 pixels.

2.) Convert all images to grayscale

3.) Rename them

And I don't want to do it all manually. I need to do it automatically - tell me how to do it?

thanks

Answer
I cannot think of an easy way to do what you want using CorelDraw. Changing image sizes is not straightforward because CorelDraw doesn't operate in pixel terms. You would need to open an image and then scale it down to a pre-determined size on the page (based on your screen resolution) before re-sampling it.

I would use Photoshop Actions to solve this one. Open as many of the images at a time as your PC can reasonably cope with, then create a new Action (Window/Actions) and record the following:
• Image/Mode/Grayscale
• Image/Image Size/250 (type 250 pixels into the Width box and click OK)
• File/Save for Web/Choose your output folder and save the file. (Note that you probably want to save to a different output folder because the images have not been renamed yet.)
• File/Close
• Stop recording

Now you can click the little Play button at the bottom of the Actions palette and each of your images will be immediately greyed, shrunk and saved. This will not take long for only 500 images.

You did not say how you want your files renaming but this probably wants doing manually. The DOS rename command could help you though, because it can rename everything using wildcard characters * and ?. If you are using the command line it is very helpful to keep your folder names short and we'll assume your new files are in a folder called C:\B

For example:
Start a command prompt (Windows key + R, type CMD, Enter)
Move into the output folder: type
C:
CD \B
REN *.jpg new-*.jpg (this will insert the string "new-" in front of all of the .JPG files).

If you don't have Photoshop you might try a free program called Digital Photo Resizer by IceGiant software. It's aimed at people who want to create sets of web thumbnails from image folders and I don't think it will desaturate your images, but it might be worth a look.

This wasn't quite the answer you were looking for, but if it helps you at all I'll be happy!