Saving Your Scripts

Batch processing is a real time saver when you have multiple files that you need to scale or export to the same format. If you know you are going to repeat the same steps for the batch process, you can even save your steps as a script that you can replay on another set of files. In the next exercise, you will repeat the steps you just completed in the preceding section. You will add a few more options and save the steps as a script to run again. The script can then be used to create thumbnails of your images.

In this exercise, you will repeat the previous steps, but you will add an option to create thumbnails of the images.

1.	Choose File > Batch Process. Locate and open the Originals folder within the Batch folder. Click Add All and then click Next. Click Scale in the Batch Options list and then click Add. Choose Scale to Fit Area and enter 72 in both the Max Width and Max Height boxes. Click Export in the Batch Options list and then click Add. Choose GIF Adaptive 256 from the Settings pop-up menu. These are the same steps you used previously, but the width and height of the scaled images are changed.
2.	Click Rename in the Batch Options list and then click Add. Choose Add Suffix from the Rename pop-up menu and type _T in the box. This will add the _T suffix to the end of your file names. Click Next. You could also have added a prefix to the file name. For this exercise, the smaller files are thumbnails, and the suffix helps you identify them as such. Note There is also a Replace Blanks control in the the Rename area. This option would be a handy way to remove spaces in your file names.
3.	Choose Custom location and then select the Thumbs folder within the Batch folder. The smaller thumbnail images are stored in the Thumbs folder.
4.	Click Save Script and type Thumbnails.jsf in the Save As (PC) or Save (Mac) dialog box that appears. Click Save. Click Cancel to close the Batch Process dialog box. Save the script file in the Batch folder within the Lesson10 folder. Your script is saved for you to use again. If you click Batch in the Batch dialog box, you will execute the script you just created and would not need to perform the next step.
5.	Choose File > Open and locate the thumbnails.jsf file you just created and then click Open. If you are on Windows choose All files in the Files of Type pop-up menu to see the file.
6.	In the Files to Process list, choose Custom and then open the Originals folder within the Batch folder. Shift-click all the files in this folder and then click Done.
7.	Click OK. The script processes those files based on the options you selected.