Resizing Photos for Use in ProShow

One of the more frequent questions we hear is ‘What size should my images be’ for use in ProShow Gold, ProShow Producer or ProShow Web. The general answer we’ve always given is to use your originals. In this article we will touch on the best tips for resizing your photos using PhotoShop and/or Lightroom to streamline your workflow when importing into ProShow.

You may be dealing with gigabytes of image data in a single slideshow that slow down your importing and loading times in ProShow, and may even cause sluggishness while editing. ProShow Web users won’t notice any sluggishness, but the upload times can most certainly be longer than they need to be when using large images.

Ideally you’d want to resize your images to the exact size you need for your slideshow. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to know how big your images need to be since your images may zoom in and out within your show. So the next best thing is to resize your images by a rule-of-thumb amount so that you can retain full 1080p quality in your shows and account for most zooms. Today I’ll show you how you can do this easily in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Take Stock of Your Image Sizes

Before you go introducing another step in your workflow, make sure your images are good candidates for resizing. For example, if your images are 8MP (~3456×2304) or less, then you’ll probably be fine using your original JPEGs. On the other hand, if your images are 18MP (~5184×3456), you may benefit from resizing.

Preparing Your Photos for Resizing

If you’re going to resize your images, the easiest way to do this is in one batch process. I recommend creating a new folder on your system and copying all the images you plan to use in your slideshow into that folder.

Using Photoshop

1. Go to File > Scripts > Image Processor
2. Use the settings below, making sure to click “Select Folder” in the top section and select the folder that contains your images.
   
3. Click Run

After a few moments, your images will all be resized and placed in a “JPEG” subfolder, ready to import into ProShow or to upload to ProShow Web.

Using Adobe Lightroom

1. Select the images in your Lightroom library that you’d like to resize
2. Go to File > Export
3. Change “Export To” option to Hard Drive at the top of the window. Set the rest of the settings up as follows:
   
4. At this point, you can optionally create a preset by clicking the Add button at the bottom left of the window. Give it a name and press OK.
   
5. Click the “Export” button at the bottom of the window to start the resizing process

Alternatively, you can use the ProShow Lightroom plugin to export straight to ProShow and do the resizing automatically for you. See the tutorial here.

TIPS:

• In my examples, I used 3456 for the pixel dimensions, which will result in ~8MP images. If you’d like to go even smaller, you can use 2880 instead to yield ~6MP images. This should still be enough to accommodate most zooming and retain full HD quality.
• If you have Adobe Photoshop Elements, see the this tutorial for step-by-step instructions on batch resizing.
• Most full-featured image editors have a batch resizing function, so if yours is not covered in this article, do a quick web search for a tutorial and use the image sizes recommended above.