If you’ve been looking for the easiest and fastest way to resize and optimize a bunch of photos in one go, you already have the best tool at your disposal: iPhoto.
Step 1: Prepare all the photos that need resizing.
I highly recommend keeping all the photos in one folder. When you’re downloading photos from Dropbox, for instance, choose the images that you’re going to use and download them all at once. You’ll save a lot of time and storage space this way. This is the original file size of the photos that I downloaded from Dropbox.
Step 2: Open iPhoto and import photos.
In iPhoto, click on “Import” and choose the folder where you kept the photos. Once this is done, all the images in that folder will be imported and displayed.
Step 3: Export photos.
Press “Command + A” to highlight all the photos. Click on “Export.”
Now this is the part where you need to choose the size and the quality of the image. What you choose would mainly depend on your needs. For example, I needed to upload screenshots for this post on WordPress. Each image needs to be less than 100KB. After trying different combinations, I found that choosing Medium for JPEG Quality and Size will result in an image that is around 40 to 60KB. I wouldn’t recommend choosing Low (smallest size). The quality of the image would greatly suffer, and if there are texts, it would be almost unreadable.
As you can see, I’ve managed to trim down the folder from 26.5 MB to 3.5 MB! By significantly reducing the file size, it will now be easier and faster to upload the photos on WordPres, send the photos to a friend via email, or upload them back to Dropbox.
Here’s the size of each image. As you can see, all of them are less than 100 KB!
Sometimes it’s best to explore the current options you have on your Mac before downloading applications on the internet. Who knows, it might provide you with a faster and easier solution.
