By Dan Moren

November 22, 2016 6:53 AM PT

Quick Tip: Batch resize images in Preview

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I always think it’s a little silly to describe my job as a “writer” when I’ve spent so much time over the years working with not just the written word, but audio, video, and images as well. Even if those aren’t my forte, as time goes on, I’ve learned certain tricks to deal with common tasks, but it’s always fun when I find one that I didn’t know about.

As an example, I was just working on a freelance story that required me to edit a bunch of screenshots to a particular size. I briefly toyed with Automator, but as always, realized that while what I wanted to do was simple enough in theory, the time it would take for me to muddle through automating it would be longer than just doing this particular job by hand.

On a whim I went to Google and searched around to see if anybody else had dealt with it, when lo and behold I stumbled across this handy 2009 tip from OS X Daily. It seems Preview can actually very quickly scale a bunch of images: just select all the image files you want to resize, open them in Preview, and select all the thumbnails in the sidebar using command-A. Go to Tools > Adjust Size and put in your desired dimensions, hit command-S to save, and you’re done. That’s it.

No complex workflows, no third-party apps, nada. Just you, your images, and Preview. Can’t get much easier than that. Guess you can teach an old “writer” new tricks.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. The latest novel in his Galactic Cold War series of sci-fi space adventures, The Nova Incident, is available now.]

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