How do I resize photos in iPhoto using automator, I haven't been able to do

Question

Hi all, was in Sydney and took over 200 pics there 8.0 megapixels each. it takes forever to send them via ichat and would like to downsize them to 5.1 or 5.0. how do i go about getting them all downsized?
Thanks all

Answer 1

I'm guessing you don't intend to suddenly drop over 200 photos into an iChat session.
I think you might as well scale them down instead of re-compress them. Just decide how you want to use them. For example, if they will be used for your desktop background, then scale them down to the screen resolution. You can find those numbers in System Preferences in Displays. Actually, that's probably a good size overall. Though, keep in mind your screen size is probably widescreen, so you'll want to try it out with an image to decide whether to go with the height or width while keeping the proportion constant.
As for using iPhoto, if you have .Mac then you can share them pretty easily by photocasting them. You wouldn't really have to worry about scaling them down, however, it does offer you option to reduce the size when they are photocasted. I believe this keeps them the same size on your computer, but uploads them at the reduced size, so it'll be quicker to upload them and download by others while you keep the same quality on your computer. Just create an album and put a few photos in there that you want to share. Or select some photos and drag and drop them into the left side of albums until you see an outline around the whole left side, then a new album will be created when you drop them.
I suppose you could share all 200 or so photos, but since you mentioned iChat it sounds like you just want to share one or two at a time and say "Hey, look at this one!". Instead, you can say "Hey, have you seen my Sydney photocast lately? Did you see the last couple of pictures I added?". You can change the photos in the album or just keep adding more and it'll appear to automatically update on everybody else's computers, too. Though, I think it's nicer when they have iPhoto to subscribe to the photocast instead of using an RSS viewer, since they can do anything they want with the photo when they have it in iPhoto, such as making it their desktop background, emailing it, have it as part of a slideshow, send an iCard (with .Mac), order prints or a photo book, etc.
Of course, you could also send some of them to iWeb (which will offer to downsize them for you, about 800x600 for the largest I think), send them to Mail to email (which offers to three different size/quality levels while telling the total MB), and so forth all from iPhoto. In fact, if you actually dropped the pics into a new email message, Mail will have an option at the bottom of the message window to resize them in the same way before sending them.
When you send some photos to iWeb, you can choose to have a single page of photos or to have them added to a blog. You might do the latter with a few of the photos if you'd like to add a special description, since each photo will be given it's own page in the blog.
As Mike said, you can also simply have them scaled down by exporting them from iPhoto, available in the File menu once you've selected the photos. Though, you'd probably interact with them with the Finder at that point, such as drag and drop into a video chat in iChat or adding them to emails. You could re-import them to iPhoto and then decide whether to keep both copies, the higher quality originals or the scaled down versions. I believe iPhoto won't make you decide, so you'll have both in different rolls and can keep them separate or delete one set or the other.