How to Quickly Reduce Image File Size for Many Images at Once in Photoshop

One of the best ways to get people to read your blog posts, apart from having something interesting to say, of course, is by incorporating pictures into each one. Visitors can become quite put off by large blocks of uninterrupted text, so it is worth it to get royalty-free pictures from sites such as Pexels.com or Pixabay.com to spice things up a bit.

The problem is, these pictures are huge, so they will eat up your bandwidth and cause your pages to load slowly. You have to make them smaller–much smaller. One could open each one individually in a photo editing program and manually resize them, but when you are dealing with dozens or hundreds of pictures, this can get tedious.

So, being lazy, I like to use the Image Processor in Adobe Photoshop to batch reduce the file size of a bunch of pictures at once. This works for all versions to date.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Put all of the pictures you want to make smaller in ONE folder on your computer. The Image Processor processes all of the files within a single folder, it does not allow you to pick and choose from all over the place.

2. In Adobe PhotoShop, go to File–>Scripts–>Image Processor.

3. Click on “Select Folder” in the top section.

4. Select the folder your pictures are in, then hit “OK”

5. Choose where you want to save the new images. I usually pick “Save in Same Location.”

6. Choose your quality. I pick “1” for lowest file size, and the images still come out great. Alternately, you can choose to resize to a specific length and width if you want to go through the trouble. I don’t.

7. Hit “Run.” Photoshop will open up each image and process it automatically. Sit back and relax.

8. When you are done, your images will be placed in a subfolder called “JPEG” in the folder you selected in step 3.

The files will go from 5 mb or whatever to about 200k. Much better, right? I hope this tip saves you content creators and bloggers out there some time.