Photoshop CS3 Droplet: Save as GIF

January 10th, 2008

Photoshop CS3 Save to GIF Droplet
(Mac OS X version)

If you use Photoshop CS3 and post screenshots to the web, this little droplet will save you a lot of trouble. For some reason it is impossible to convert ImageReady or previous Photoshop versions Droplets to Photoshop CS3.

Installation and Usage Instructions:

1. download the zip
2. decompress
3. move to the folder of your choice (I have a special folder for Photoshop and Image Ready droplets)
4. title your images for upload (spaces are okay - PS3 will convert them to hyphens)
5. drop your images on the droplet
6. your web ready GIF's will appear in your desktop folder

For equally unknown reasons is also extremely difficult to create a droplet which will actually open your image and resave it as you would like right in the folder where it lies.

Even my version here will save the GIF file to your desktop, rather than the folder where the original lies (my preference). Desktop isn't bad, as you can then upload the image and archive the extra desktop files every couple of days in a date named folder in a desktop archive folder.

Current advice on the Photoshop forum is to use the Image Processor or to move to Fireworks (a program I and many other Photoshop users have never opened up, let alone want to leave running constantly in the background). Image Processor is a nice piece of kit, but it's suited to bigger jobs, whole folders. What I need is something to convert my screenshots from .png to .gif or .jpeg for posting to the web. Nothing against PNG - it's a great format, but my web server will be very full very fast with the 500 KB files it generates. Moreover, much as I like images, there's no reason for anyone to have to wait that long to download screenshots.

So I need a droplet just to take the PNG and save it as GIF. This is that droplet.

BTW, you should never convert your screenshots to jpeg, except a very high quality compression algorithm. The only reason to prefer jpeg to GIF for screenshots - which are usually mainly text - is if they include photos.

References:

• This is the tutorial which finally set me straight on how to create saving droplets in Photoshop after wasting an hour reading the incoherent bluster about Fireworks on the Adobe Forums and in Adobe Help Documents.
• This is the best of the Adobe documentation on Photoshop Actions (closely related to Droplets).

alec | WordPress | 7 comments

WordPress Photo Galleries: State of the WordPress Images War

August 24th, 2007

I'm on a professional WordPress mailing list and this interesting question came up:

I'm using Wordpress 2.2 as a CMS to create a site for a client with a small business. My client wants a portfolio page (not necessrily a WP Page) with a list of thumbnails that will each link to its own "gallery" page which will include multiple photographs with some descriptions. My client is a non-programmer who will need to update and add to the portfolio page on her own.

I've been looking at WPG2 and wondering if this will accomplish my needs. I've seen you can put photos in posts, but can you link those post photos to a WP Page that contains more photos from that category in a gallery style (such as the embedded WPG2)? I will also need descriptions about those photos on that Page. I've looked at other sites that have WPG2 embedded within Pages, but their Pages don't contain photo descriptions beyond the photo title.

Does WPG2 seem a good fit? Or is there another plugin that works better? Or will this not be possible?

Alas, Tracy, all of the galleries in WordPress stink. Both Gallery 1 and 2 are way too top heavy on their own. Mixing Gallery with WordPress would be a fatal PHP cocktail, capable of choking the most powerful server and confusing the most adroit programmer.

We've spent whole days at Foliovision playing around with what's out there in terms of WordPress image plugins and there's nothing I would recommend.

The closest thing to what you want are (listed in order of least amount of work to get something passable):

1. NextGEN Gallery
2. ZenPhoto
3. PictPress - Vermeer demo gallery
4. WPPA
5. Duh Gallery

All have huge problems with URLs and reliability. ZenPhoto is by far the best in terms of simplicity and clean URLs, but it's not well integrated into WordPress just yet.

If you can make any of the above work, without clunkiness and/or very ugly URLs, please comment below. If you find something better, let us know.

At Foliovision, we are currently doing some work on an images plugin but it won't be for larger galleries but for embedding images directly into posts in a simplified workflow. As soon as FV Images is ready, we'll be posting it here.

For the moment, if you want something clean, I'd have to recommend doing it by hand (uploading all the images in both full size and thumbnail and linking and embedding them).

Ecto (available for Windows and Mac) can also be a great help when you have a lot of images to include in a post. The quality of the thumbnailing is poor on Typepad (I have one weblog over there still) but could be handtweaked on WordPress. It can be tricky to get Ecto to play nicely with WordPress built-in XML-RPC.

admin | WordPress | No comments