Improve Scale Images action in Automator making it closer to Pixelmator Pro's in-app Image Size UI.

What features would you like to see in Pixelmator Pro?
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2021-03-02 10:51:18

Currently Pixelmator Pro's automator Scale Images action appears to fit images to a specific set of pixel dimensions (defaulting to 640x480), offering the option to scale proportionally. Unless I'm missing something these options are somewhat lacklustre.

It would be much more useful if the Scale Images automator action behaved a lot like Pixelmator Pro's in-app Image Size UI, providing options to scale in terms of pixels, percent, inches, cm, mm and points. The option for resampling and resize algorithm (Bilinear, Lanczos, Nearest Neighbor) would be most useful too.

Note: Currently using Pixelmator Pro 1.8.
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2021-03-05 08:22:58

I'm not sure if we'll be this option to Automator but we've already made it possible using AppleScript! :) If your workflow is mainly focused around Automator though, you can convert the scripts you write to Automator workflows and combine them with other actions.
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2022-08-21 14:06:39

To the pixelmator team

I am having the same issue; using automator is not scaling images correctly... This function is at the moment useless.

I am no programmer or expert so could you please provide a simple script that would convert all images in a folder to 1200 pixel width and scale the height proportionally ?
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2022-08-21 14:07:06

by Aurelija I'm not sure if we'll be this option to Automator but we've already made it possible using AppleScript! :) If your workflow is mainly focused around Automator though, you can convert the scripts you write to Automator workflows and combine them with other actions.
To the pixelmator team

I am having the same issue; using automator is not scaling images correctly... This function is at the moment useless.

I am no programmer or expert so could you please provide a simple script that would convert all images in a folder to 1200 pixel width and scale the height proportionally ?

I have this
on run {input, parameters}
	tell application "Pixelmator Pro"
		tell the front document to resize image width 1600 resolution 96 algorithm bilinear
	end tell
end run
BUT it is doing nothing at all

Where do I set "Scale proportionally" ?
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2023-12-02 19:48:49

AppleScript can be good for complex image processing but it makes even the simplest task minimally complex.

“Just scaling” an image would include:
- getting the path of the file in a format that is acceptable for the “open” command, then
- looping over multiple "convert" requests more than one was added.
- finding what window / tab within Pixelmator the opened file is in (did the command run too quickly and the frontmost window is an image that was already loaded because the file you want is still opening?)
- to avoid that add in some error checking to make sure the name of the frontmost window is the name of the file you wanted opened.
- do the scaling
- close the window you just opened.
- if in a loop make sure you left enough time for the cleanup before opening the next window.

All this (and probably more) as opposed to the single automator action where this all happens automatically (and in the background).

But the real reason I’m here is to ask for my own feature for automator scaling: It would be great if these dimensions were not “width” and “height” but “longer side” and “shorter side” since it could be in landscape or portrait but we might want them all to be 1200px on the long side, regardless of orientation.

Thanks!
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