Resizing images and .jpg file size

[microtorque]

I would like to use Batchphoto to produce re-sized images and thumbnails for my website. However, the smallest I can get a thumbnail (300 x 200 pixels) is about 70Kb - Photoshop normally makes these around 20Kb. If I reduce quality, the thumbnail quality certainly gets worse, but the filesize stays at about 70Kb. If I tick the box for "file size" and set to 20Kb, it still comes out as 70Kb. Am I doing something wrong here?

Second thing, more of a nice to have than essential: I would like to resize images to either 1200 wide, or 800 high, whichever is the smaller. This is so portrait format images are resized to fit on the screen vertically, landscape ones resized to display horizontally. This seems to be a common request from users for all of these types of programs but I haven't been able to find a way of doing it.

Otherwise, I think it's a good program and looks as if it will do the job we need.

[Cezar]

Dear user,

It is not advised to use the Fixed Size option when trying to get very small file sizes for JPEG photos. Try modifying the Quality parameter instead.

Regarding the feature you mentioned, you can achieve the desired effect using the Thumbnail filter. The next version of BatchPhoto will have a new resize option that refers directly to this feature.

[microtorque]

Altering the quality slider alters the quality, however, file size for a 300 x 200 image than I'm processing never goes below 70Kb (even at very high compression values and corresponding poor quality), whereas Photoshop produces a reasonable quality image at this image size in about 30Kb. 70Kb is too big for what I want to do - I am producing thumbnails for a website, we often have 20 or 30 on a page.

Regarding re-sizing images, I want to re-size so an image is 800 high, maintaining its aspect ratio. So if it's a 1200 x 800 landscape image, it would display as-is, if 800 x 1200 portrait, it would be re-sized to 533 x 800. Lots of people seem to want to do this, most solutions posted on the internet involve writing code, php etc. If your next release will do this, I am happy to wait for that - if not, I need to keep looking for a solution.

Thanks for your help so far

[Cezar]

Dear user,

Unfortunately, regarding the size of the pictures, I cannot give you a concise solution because the third-party library we are using for resizing pictures does not offer us the possibility to control the size of the output files to a very high degree.

Regarding the resize feature you mentioned I would suggest you take a look at BatchPhoto's Thumbnail filter. Because, from the way you described the desired behavior, I think this filter can help you achieve your goal. Use this filter as a temporary solution until we launch the next version of BatchPhoto which will explicitly contain this feature.