I am sure many dread the need to resize their mountain of treasured photos from their recent holiday adventures before they can be uploaded to their favorite photo-sharing site for the whole world to see.

This quick tutorial will show you how this often tedious and manual task can be accomplished through the use of Quicksilver by re-scaling a selection of photos.

Those unfamiliar to Quicksilver can read my previous AppleSource tutorial for a quick overview of its primary use.

Install plugin

Step 1
Firstly we need to install the required image plugin, by default Quicksilver does not have it installed. Below are two options to access the 'Plug-ins' dialog box to install the necessary plugin for the rest of the tutorial.

Option 1
If you have the Quicksilver set to be displayed in the Menubar, then by selecting the 'Quicksilver icon -> Quicksilver -> Plug-ins' will present you with the plugins dialog box.

Option 2
If you have not changed the default display behaviour of the Quicksilver icon then it will be displayed in the Dock. Accessing the plugins dialog box is done by clicking and holding, or right-clicking onto the Quicksilver icon and selecting 'Plug-ins' from the subsequent pop-up menu.

Step 2
You will be presented with a list of plugins to install, what we are interested in can be found within the 'All-Plugins' category on the left pane of the dialog box. Click it and select 'Image'. The plugin used for scaling is called 'Image Manipulation Actions(+)' in the right pane, selecting the tickbox will install and activate the plugin.

Re-scale images

With the plugin installed we can now close the 'Plug-ins' dialog box and begin to scale our images, here are some I took at a recent trip to Melbourne.

Step 1
Activate Quicksilver through the default shortcut of 'CTRL+Space' and search for the image folder - in my case it was by typing in 'Desktop/Pictures'.

Step 2
Now that Quicksilver has found our image folder, we need to tell it what images to scale. This is done by selecting the action 'Show Contents' on our image folder by clicking on the arrow which is inline with the 'Actions' text, as seen in the screenshot below.

Step 3
By default Quicksilver will show a listing of all the files within the folder, in this case a list of image files, highlighting only the first file in the list. If you want to just manipulate that particular image then it is fine, but if we want to re-scale all images you have to select all of the images on that list. All the images can be selected through a simple keyboard shortcut 'Apple key+A', the same shortcut is used to select all items in a folder. Quicksilver will then indicate you have selected all images, in my case 8 images, as indicated below.

Step 4
With all the images selected, we can proceed to scale the images by selecting the appropriate action in the 'Actions' list, again through the inline arrow.

Step 5
After the 'Scale image...' action is selected a textbox is presented beneath the action in the Quicksilver dialog box. This is where you enter the new desired dimensions of the images, 450x390 was an example I used, then click 'Execute'.

Mission accomplished!
Voila... Quicksilver has scaled the original photos to the new dimensions I have set and saved them as new files in the same folder.

That concludes our tutorial on re-scaling images and photos with Quicksilver, I hope it was useful and if you have any issues or want any thing clarified please leave us your comments below or email us at edit@applesource.com.au.