Unlike most of our tutorials, we won’t be started by opening up a new document. Instead, browse to File > Batch Process.

You should see a screen similar to this one:

When I’m getting ready to batch some photos I’ll typically put everything I need into it’s own folder. In that case with the screen above I could simply browse to the folder and then click the Add All button. If you prefer you can click to highlight the images you want (Ctrl + Click to highlight multiple images) and then hit the Add button. Once you have all the images you want in the white box at the bottom hit the Next button.

We should come to a screen that looks like this:

The options that you have available in Fireworks Batch are shown in the left column. To add one of the options simply click it and press the Add button in the center. If you highlight the option you’ve added in the left column you can configure it further.

Lets go over each individual option:

Export

If you’re working with big images that came right off a camera, this is great way to manipulate them. You can select any of the standard web export choices that come bundled with Fireworks, any custom export options you may have created, or you can choose a custom export option.  We’ll dive into some of the advanced options of image exporting in another post, but here’s a quick guide:

Access the settings by choosing custom… from the dropdown and then clicking the Edit button. From the top left you can select the type of file you’d like to export your images as, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc. Once you select the type you can make additional adjustments such as compression for JPEG images, color pallet for GIF files, etc. You’ll note that you see the file size (on disk) and the estimated download time in real time as you change the file type and adjust the settings. For general photos that would appear in an image gallery or something similar I typically use the JPEG file format with the quality set to 85. Once you have your settings tweaked just press “OK” to return to the batch setup.

Scale

Scale is another batch option I use frequently. Once added to the batch process your options include: Scale to Size, Scale to Fit Area, and Scale to Percentage.

Scale to Size

Set the exact height and width you want your images. If you select Variable in either dropdown Fireworks will retain the correct aspect ratio of the image.

Scale to Fit Area

Similar to the above option but with additional flexibility (my favorite). Set your maximum width or height and Fireworks does the rest. If you have a mix of horizontal and vertically oriented photos this option works great. You can also check the box to have Fireworks only scale images that are larger than your set height/width, that way you can avoid blowing up smaller images and ending up with blurry photos.

Scale to Percentage

As simple as it sounds. If you want to change a 1000px wide photos to 500px change the slider to 50%.

Find and Replace

Find and Replace can be very powerful, especially if you use Fireworks on a day-to-day basis and have hundreds of PNGs floating around. You can run this option only on Fireworks PNG files (as well as Macromedia Freehand files). If for example you wanted to change any instance of the font “Times New Roman” to “Helvetica”, this option makes it effortless. You can also change sections of text, colors, URLs, and more.

Rename

Rename is a great way of removing text from batches of files. For example, my camera adds the letter “p” to the beginning of each image file name – I can easily remove them while batching. You can also add prefixes and suffixes, or replace/remove blank spaces (to “replace” a character or blank space with nothing simply leave the “with:” field blank).

The above options would take a file names img001 and change it to product-photo-001.

Commands

There’s loads of graphical options in the Commands section of batch processing. You can convert the images to greyscale or sepia, rotate images, sharpen or blur, and much much more.

Wrapping up your Batch

If I decide I need to sharpen some large images before resizing them, it’s important I have the batch process in the right order (sharpen then resize). You can adjust the order that batch runs the commands on each image using the arrows in the upper right hand corner. Simply select the option you want to move and click the appropriate up or down arrow.

Once you have your options configured and in the proper order, click next.

The final step of the batch process is to set the output and backup options.  I typically want to keep my original photos untouched, so I choose Custom Location and then create a new folder to hold the post-batch images. If this is a batch you’ll run frequently you can also elect to save the batch script as a JSF file for later use. Click the Batch button to run the process and Fireworks will inform you when it has completed the chore!

Has batch processing saved your butt in the past? Do you have any more advanced techniques using this feature of Fireworks? Feel free to post below!