Fireworks Pro Series: Batch Processing

Web designers talk a lot about apps or gadgets that are “magic wands”… but today we’re going to look at a unique feature inside Adobe Fireworks that might even live up to the name. If you haven’t taken the time to check out the “batch processing” feature in Adobe Fireworks yet, now’s the time to do it. In no time you’ll be saving time and reducing the filesizes on all of your web graphics!

Batch Processing in Adobe Fireworks

Batch Processing is probably one of our favorite tools in Fireworks. There’s simply nothing like it in any other program (including Photoshop) – in under a minute you can literally turn a 100MB folder of web images into a 60MB of the exact same images… or you can resize and crop hundreds of images to itty bitty thumbnails using your own dimensions.

Even if you don’t like using Fireworks for designing, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to be using this tool a LOT in the future once you discover it. With just a few clicks, you can run a batch processing script over an entire folder of web-images that will:

• Reduce the filesize on web images (up to 40% over Photoshop)
• Crop any images to your desired dimmensions
• Rename images using your own formulas
• Run custom commands
• Even find and replace text within .PNG files

Here’s the video – I’ll let Tom take it from here:

About the Author

Tom Green is a professor of Interactive Multimedia through the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s School of Media Studies. Like all faculty in the program, Tom believes his students deserve to be taught by instructors who are regarded as experts in their field and whose knowledge of their subject is current with industry best practice. He is an Adobe Community Expert, Adobe Education Leader (Post Secondary), Community MX partner and was listed in Adobe’s Top Ten Most Influential Flash Designers.

Tom has written several books (9 in all!) and extended tutorials on the topic of Fireworks and web design over the last 7 years, so he’s a natural fit to guide us through this incredible program. After this introduction, Tom will be guiding us through the wonderful world of Fireworks with several video tutorials. Alright, now that you know a bit about Tom, let’s dig in!

About the Fireworks Pro Series

If you’ve been wondering about what makes Fireworks tick for a while, this “Session” is being recorded for you!

We’re amassing quite a few tutorials for everyone from the beginner to the expert, so be sure to check out our entire library of Fireworks tutorials.

If you have a particular request or question about using Fireworks for web or app design, post it in the comments section along with any of your other thoughts!