Anne Kowalski

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Creating Photo Thumbnails in Fireworks CS3

Here's a quick guide to creating photo thumbnails in Fireworks CS3. Fireworks does a much better job resizing photos than the software built into most CMS or blogging software. This method is really useful if you have multiple photos you need resized. To make this easier, organize all of the photos you want resized into a folder.

1. Open Fireworks.
2. Select File, Batch Process...
3. Navigate to the folder where you have your batch images stored. If you want all of them resized, click the Add All button. If you only want a few resized, hold down the CTRL key while clicking the images you want, then click Add.
4. Click the Next button.
5. On the next screen, there are two columns. Select Export and click Add.
6. Make sure JPEG is select as the export format in the drop-down menu, especially if you are resizing photos. It is up to your personal preferences as to selecting Better Quality or Smaller File. If you would like more options, just click the Edit button next to the drop down menu.
7. Look in the left column for Scale. Select Scale and click Add.
8. Make sure Scale is selected in the right column. Below the two columns are the options for Scale. Select Scale to Size from the drop-down menu.
9. Key in your resizing preferences. You only need to input one value. For the other value, type variable. This is crucial if you want to keep your images proportionate. Click Next.
10. On the next screen are options for where to save your file. Make sure you do not select the first location (same location as original file) unless you don't care about overwriting your original images. I usually select the second option (custom location) and put the thumbnails in a dedicated folder.
11. Click the Batch button.

That's it! Fireworks resizes your images for you and saves them to the folder.