Need to batch process to reduce file size

peter

peter

peter

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18 Oct 2002
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708
Location
milton keynes
I have just tried to upload our holiday pictures to photobox to produce a book.
rejected most of them as the file size limit is 10mb. They are all raw edited in PS saved as jpeg but still too large. I have CS6 but not lightroom . What is the best way of doing this ? About 400 files to do.

thanks
 
If it is a one-off, I would download the months' free trial of Lightroom, import all the photos into a catalogue, then export them to a different directory using a quality setting of 100%, and specifying a file size limit of 10mb. Lightroom will then adjust the quality of any that exceed that to suit, but keep the original dimensions the same.

There's also a program called advanced jpeg compressor which I use when I really want to heavily compress files, e.g. for creating thumbnails, reduced size versions for on-line galleries etc. It took a while to work out how to create a profile for batch processing. It's quite quick - take about 3 minutes to compress around 300 full size images to 800px wide, stripping out the EXIF data and compressing to about 70 - 100 Kb each. I think it does have a lossless compression option as well, but I've never used that. Think the cost was about $30 about 4 years ago and it's saved me more than that over the years in the time saved uploading batches of photos to websites/FB etc, before fibre broadband was available in our area.
 
How about creating a Photoshop action to run File - Export - Save for web with suitable compression. Pick one of your most finely detailed/chaotic/noisy images from the set when recording the action and use the file size estimate at the bottom of the Save for web window as a guide. Save to a separate location so that you can easily identify the newly exported files when you've done the whole batch. Close the image and stop recording the action.

Then use the File - Automate - Batch window to run that action on all the files.

It's been a while since I've used CS6, but from memory that's what I'd do...
 
If you have CS6 you could try the export function in Bridge, export with same image size but reduce the quality down to 10. Duplicates each image into it's own folder so you're not overwriting the original files.
 
Printing to an A3 size book I have done as John suggested and used lightroom to limit file size . Takes some down to 7mb though they look ok . File size is huge as they were from a D800, raw files converted to jpeg.
Thanks folks some of the files below

 
Adobe bridge will do this like steeps suggests. It's what I use as I don't like lightroom. In the bottom left there is an export tab that allows you to create presets where you set the destination, file type and compression level along with the ability to manually resize the image. Just select all the images and drag to a preset and it creates a batch.
 
peter said:
I have just tried to upload our holiday pictures to photobox to produce a book.
rejected most of them as the file size limit is 10mb. They are all raw edited in PS saved as jpeg but still too large. I have CS6 but not lightroom . What is the best way of doing this ? About 400 files to do.

thanks
Click to expand...

The real problem here is photobox, use a different service that will allow real file sizes and quality prints. Don't degrade your print quality just because photobox are antiquated.


If you re printing at A3 like the post above says then I would keep jepg at 90-9% quality and retain the full 36MP of goodness your camera can produces.
 
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