A Beginner’s Guide to Actions & Droplets

If you need to add on to the action later, you can start recording again by hitting the “Record” button. To perform the action on another image, simply open the image and hit the “Play” button for the action.

As you can see, every step we took in making the thumbnail image was recorded for us.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 7

Great! Now let’s create a droplet. The good news is, most of the work is already done for us, since all we have to do now is package the action we just made into the external application.

Go to File - Automate - Create Droplet. You should see a dialog like the one below (this may vary slightly in appearance based on which version of Photoshop you are using).

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 8

Click the “Choose” button and select the location where you want to save your droplet. I’m just putting mine on the desktop. You can give your action a name here as well. In this case, I’m calling it “Make_Thumbnail.exe.”

Under the “Play” section, select the group and action we just created.

Check the “Suppress Color Profile Warnings” and any other options you may want, like the inclusion of subfolders.

Under the “Save” settings, you have many options, such as to not save the images and just leave them open in Photoshop, or to save them in their original location and close them, or to save them to a new destination. For now, we’ll just select “Save and Close.” If you choose to save your finished images to a specific location, you can also select various file naming conventions via the dropdown menus, such as whether or not to number the images or change file names to upper or lower case.

Your settings should now look like the figure below. Click “OK” to create your droplet.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 9

Go to your desktop and check out your new droplet! To test it, simply drag and drop an image onto it.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 10

As stated, droplets can be shared across different computers and used with any version of Photoshop that’s equal to or newer than the one on which it was created, so if you would like, you may download this CS2 compatible droplet.

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Added Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 5:28 pm under Tips.