Actions help

I will make this as brief as possible

I am attempting to automate the coversion of large group of TIF's into GIF's. I have built actions to crop the file and change the color mode and format while saving and closing the files. I need to resize most of the images down to around 608 width for web reasons. I have been trying to make an action to automate this as well. Don't like to use "image resize" I usually go with "transform - scale" because I seem to get better results.(the images normally start at around 1200-2000 width (pixels)). When I build the action using the transform method it's not allowing me to put in a specific resize value (60 . It's automatically converting the resize in the action to a percentage (57.6% of the original or something like like). This is not working because the images are all different sizes so the action is not giving me an exact 608 width.

Photoshop 6.0

Action details

1. coverts image from bitmap to greyscale (bitmap can't be transformed)

2. Select all (selects entire image)

3. Edit/Transform/Scale (on the size bar I'm clicking "maintain aspect ratio", right clicking on both "W" and "H" and selectin "pixels", and then typing in "608 px" into width. (Then clicking "commit transform)

To finish the action:

4. I crop out the white space and then do a deselect.

Then stop the action record.

When I look at the action resize instead of 608 px it says 47% H 48% W or some percentage.

What are my doing wrong?

Sorry for such detail! I can't do a batch process because most of the images require an initial crop before resize

I dont know of anyway to get "good" results when doing resizing on the fly....unless
ALL the images start out the same size...

maybe you could run thru them and crop them all to a common size first?

Thanks anyways, just trying to simplify my job.:(