using actions: saving files with consecutive filenames

My first visit to the forum, awesome site btw. Question about saving images through an action. According to the 7.0 help manual, I should leave the filename as the default if I want my files to be saved with consecutive names (i.e. image01,image02, etc).

I created an action to do a number of things before saving my file.. everything works great except that photoshop keeps saving my file as 'untitled-1.jpg,' which overwrites the previous file of the same name. What can i do? Feel free to IM as well.

Cheers,

sto

Go to File --> Automate --> Batch

there you can choose a source folder and a save to folder, then the names can be automated to increment.

I tried to add that batch command to my action.. problem with that is that it wants to save my original (which I need to delete after processing) and it wants to prompt me to save.. I want all the actions to happen automatically. I'll try to explain my scenario better. This is what I'm doing.

1. Opening a scan that contains 4 images
2. Selecting one image, cutting it out
3. Creating a new image, pasting the cut
4. Flattening the image, saving the image as a jpeg in a different dir
5. repeating steps 1-4 with the original file, scans 2-4

I'd like to be able to do all of that in one step. Anyone else?

Originally posted by sto

1. Opening a scan that contains 4 images
2. Selecting one image, cutting it out
3. Creating a new image, pasting the cut
4. Flattening the image, saving the image as a jpeg in a different dir
5. repeating steps 1-4 with the original file, scans 2-4

2. You can do that with Batch.
3. Ditto
4. Ditto

Where you will run into trouble is the scanning bit. You are going to have to scan the images and then save them on your computer. I dont think you can take an image and cut a section out and then batch it so that it chooses a different area. How would the batch know what other area you want selected?

Batching can't do everything. In essence you are telling it to choose the area that you want cropped for the next image after the original one. One thing you can also do is save as into a different folder and it wont save over the original.

One other thing, I think you should spend a few minutes and read the help files in photoshop, because it explains exactly what you want to do in the first page there (hint)....

marble: the action starts after i've selected an area to cut.. I modified one of the standard photoshop actions to 'save as jpeg'.. but for whatever reason my action doesn't go through with the save. try creating the aciton for yourself.. try the batch action to save the files as well.. you'll see that it doesn't work the way it should.

I have saved several hundreds of images at a time from cd's that were given to me of digital camera shots. What I did was batch it so that it reduced the size, enhanced them, then saved to a new location as a reduced size jpeg. It will work.

It is real easy to create a new action. Which you should do.
Just hit that little arrow at the top and select --> new action... give it a name and be ready to record you every move in the exact way you need to. Then hit stop. Now you have a new action that will appear in that list.

I would avoid taking an already existing action and changing it. But that is just me.

Batching works off of an action. So if you create an action to save as a jpeg, then you can go to the batch and then hit batch with these parameters (action).