Creating Droplets in Photoshop

Droplets are drag-and-drop miniapplications, or applets, in macro form that can exist outside of Photoshop on your desktop, in your taskbar, or within a folder. They’re always available so that you can apply them to any image files you want. Think of them as batches waiting to happen.

Even though you don’t have to be running Photoshop to use droplets, you do need to have Photoshop installed on your computer. If you move the droplet to another computer that doesn’t have Photoshop on it, the droplet just sits there and looks pretty.

All you need to do is drag the file or files you want to process onto the droplet. Photoshop doesn’t even have to be open at the time. When you drop the file or files, the droplet opens Photoshop and carries out the steps in the action embedded in the droplet’s instructions. You must use an existing action as the core of the droplet. To create a droplet, follow these steps:

1. Choose File➪Automate➪Create Droplet.
The Create Droplet dialog box opens.

2. In the Save Droplet In area, click the Choose button and enter a name and location on your hard drive for the droplet application.
The location isn’t of overriding importance because after you create the droplet, you can drag it to your desktop, a toolbar, or wherever you like.

The rest of the Create Droplet dialog box is the same as the Batch Processing dialog box (described in the steps in the preceding section), except that you don’t have to specify a Source. Droplets use the files dropped on them as their source files.

3. In the Play area, choose the actions set, action, and options.

4. Select a destination from the Destination pop-up menu.

5. Specify any file-naming options you want.

6. Specify how Photoshop should process errors.

7. When you’re finished, click OK to create the droplet.
To use the droplet, just select the file, files, or folders you want to process and drag them to the droplet applet.