Bits and Bytes
THE ANSWER GUY
iPad Image Resizing by KEVIN MCISAAC I really like my iPad. I’ve used one in place of a laptop for years now. I rarely have reason to miss having a full laptop, but there is one area where I do: image work. Recently I had to do a bunch of work on the Wapiti website and I was away travelling. This was a problem. I wanted to add the bands for the lineup but that entailed getting images from their press kits, resizing / cropping them, and uploading them to the website. Once the image is on the website the web framework takes care of delivering the images in the correct size for different devices, but I still don’t want to upload 4 -10 MB images as they take a lot of processing time and space on the server. So, I want to downsize them and that’s when I ran into the one problem I have on the iPad – there’s no built-in way to resize an image. There is a way, which I’ll explain in a moment, but perhaps you’re wondering why I’m dedicating an entire column to such a niche problem. For two reasons: more and more people are using their iPad while travelling to edit, store, and send their photos, and because the solution is just one use of shortcuts. Learning how they work will open a lot of iPad doors for you. Here’s how I created a shortcut that would let me select the images I wanted, let me resize them all to a specific size or percentage of original, and save the edited photos back to the library from which I could then upload to the website.
Stock Photo • Open the Shortcuts app. • Press + to start a new shortcut • Give it a name like Resize Photos • Under Media find Get Images from Input • Click on it to add to the shortcut • Click on Input on the added item • Click on Continue • Click on Ask For • It should change to if there’s no input Ask for Photos • Go back to the right side of the shortcut editing screen and click on Media. • Scroll down and click on Resize Image • Resize Images to Size will get added to script • Click on Size then Click on Ask Each Time
• Go back to right side of shortcut editing screen and click on Media • Scroll down and click on Save to Photo Album • Click Done Now whenever you have images to resize you can go into shortcuts, click on the new Resize Photos shortcut, and it’ll open up and ask you to select photos from your photo library, ask what you want to resize them to, then save the new photos to the photo library. There are many other options in shortcuts including, flipping, cropping, rotating, combining images, converting images, etc. I’ll leave you to explore those on your own, but it’s likely that you can avoid downloading third party apps for all but the most complex photo edits and just do them with shortcuts. FERNIEFIX.COM
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