I want to send somebody small size samples of 200 vacation pictures, say 500-1000 pixels wide instead of 7,000 pixels wide. View NX can shrink when exporting JPEG. Some of my files were edited with Capture NX 2 so View NX refuses to export them. I need to use Capture NX 2. Capture does not have a shrink option in the export menu. The quality option isn't good enough. Even "highest compression ratio" aka quality 10 makes the files 2-3 megabytes. (A bug?) I'm not going to risk doing a batch scale operation (even if I could find the menu for it) because it would probably save the change permanently.

What's my best option?

Plan B is export them all huge and run a separate tool to shrink the pixel size of the files. djpeg|pnmscale|cjpeg on Unix will do it.

Do one test image. Save it to another folder so it doesn't over write you original.

First use the Size/Resolution command in the Edit menu to make the image the pixel dimensions that you want.

Then save and adjust the jpg quality to suit.

If you are happy with the results, save the Size/Resolution edit step as an adjustment.

Then, open the batch processor, select the images that you want, set the jpg settings, save to another folder to avoid overwriting and go.

That should do it. You will probably need to play with the Size/Resolution and jpg quality to get the test image close to the size that you want.

I can also suggest that you try Photo Mechanic to do this king of thing. It works great with targeting file size and doesn't care what image editor you used.

Mick
http://www.mickklassphoto.com
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Visit my nikonians gallery

That worked. Thanks. I didn't realize batch operations could be output to another directory safely.

CNX has a lot of batch options, once you delve into it.

I'm glad it worked for you.

Mick
http://www.mickklassphoto.com
or
Visit my nikonians gallery

On second look that didn't quite work but close enough for my purposes. There was a popup window asking what do to about conflicts. From experience both choices, overwrite or preserve existing, do the wrong thing. My choice caused crop information to be lost. Not a big deal in this case.

Hmmm, if you were writing the new files to another directory, what was causing conflicts?

Mick
http://www.mickklassphoto.com
or
Visit my nikonians gallery

Scaling and cropping must be considered part of a single scale+crop transformation. I had saved the files earlier with cropping. When I batch applied scaling and no explicit cropping it saw a "conflict" and complained. In my limited experience batch operations always complain about conflicts of some sort.

Ah, that dialog. It gives you a chance to decide which saved adjustment you actually want to apply. If you have previously cropped the photos and only want to resize, just leave resize as the only thing corrected.

By-the-way, this is also a good way to convert from one color space to another, should your end user need something different (say sRGB instead of Adobe RGB).

Mick
http://www.mickklassphoto.com
or
Visit my nikonians gallery

I actually modified my workflow to stay within View NX2 for quick edits, crops and sharing. This workflow is typical for events or vacation. When you are sharing 50 or more images, people tend not to look for the detailed edits I was doing in Capture. I know that does not work in all cases, but it accommodates the resizing and conversion needs. I remove those edits and start over for a full edit in Capture where appropriate.

Today I use Photo Mechanic. It's completely painless - it resizes, converts color space, and watermarks a mixed set of Capture and View edits. I also use Photo Mechanic for titles, captions, and keywords.

Eric Bowles
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