How to Standardize Our Pictures

[edwinedwin]

we are currently undergoing a massive redesign of our web site. we have roughly 7,000 pictures of different sizes, resolutions, etc. and want to standardize them by removing their backgrounds, making them the same size, and inserting a watermark - without sacrificing quality. The company that originally designed the site and still helps us with this kind of stuff estimates it will take over a year to accomplish this, manually fixing each picture.

Does that sound right? Is there software that will automatically do this? In ideal world, all this would have done at the (pre) design phase, but we are well past that now. Any useful ideas would be most appreciated.

[Bob Barr]

Making them the same size would be fairly easy and automatable. There's a program called EZThumbnails available that can do that. It's a free download at http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/?Easy%20Thumbnails.

Once you get into removing backgrounds and adding watermarks, though, I think you're looking at a lot of manual work.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Without seeing the pictures involved,
About 29 weeks full time (40 hr week) doing one by one. Depends on the condition of the images to start with. Could be slower or faster.

Removing the backgrounds would probably be the hardest part.

If the new size is smaller than the smallest existing one you could probably find a batch script to crop the center of each to the new size but that might crop the wrong parts.

The watermark part you can definately do with a batch script. e.g. uMark or within something like Photoshop.

[academysigma]

You can Record a photoshop Action which can resize, crop and add watermark quite easily. Then you can apply the action to all the images in any folder in one go. However, removing the background by batch may be particularly difficult, as each image may require a different technique and probably has to be done manually. May I ask why it's necessary to remove the background? Are these photos of products?

[bangshws]

removing background is impossible to be done automatically.

[Dreamrage]

Originally Posted by bangshws

removing background is impossible to be done automatically.

With respect it can be done, its just not always feasible. You can set up Photoshop actions to do this, or work with batch processing, but at the end of the day you need to have a look at the images themselves.

If they are all different sizes, putting them into one uniform size might distort the images, you could constrain proportions when working on the image sizes, but that might also lead to the images being different sizes still.

It all depends on the images. Removing the backgrounds is easy, any photo manipulator should be able to do that relatively quickly. It's the resizing that's going to take time because there might be a bit of cropping involved when working on the images.

An easy route to take would be taking each photo, removing the background, resizing what's left on the image, using the transform tools, and then cropping the image to size. That way, the image isn't distorted too much when you make them all the same size, and the image quality isn't compromised.

IMO

[bangshws]

sure! thanks for advice. I mean you can set up a script for that but at last there is no guarantee at the end.

[Dreamrage]

Not really. If the images were all the same size to begin with, it may give you a more predicable result, but with different image sizes, its safer to do them manually.

When you set up actions etc. you give Photoshop a set of rules to work with on each image. Each image then gets the exact same treatment. I'm pretty sure using batch processing does the same thing. Which is why it would be better to rather just do it manually than remove the background off each image, and then put them through an action or process.

[bangshws]

Originally Posted by Dreamrage

Not really. If the images were all the same size to begin with, it may give you a more predicable result, but with different image sizes, its safer to do them manually.

When you set up actions etc. you give Photoshop a set of rules to work with on each image. Each image then gets the exact same treatment. I'm pretty sure using batch processing does the same thing. Which is why it would be better to rather just do it manually than remove the background off each image, and then put them through an action or process.

Yes, I agree with you on this. The images must be somehow similar in order to do that. But because he said he has images with different sizes. That's why.