Exploding Images with Photoshop Elements

/

Dalby Forest Fence

Every now and then I fall over hilarious bugs that really shouldn’t be out there. It kind of cheers me up. I’ve never written software with holes like these, and they are selling theirs as product.

I’ve found a truly smashing one in Photoshop Elements. I have a love-hate relationship with this program. I stick with it because it does what I want eventually and I can’t be bothered to learn another program. I have the feeling that it could do pretty much anything, although I also have the feeling that I’ll never figure out how to use it.

Anyhoo, the bug/feature has to do with bulk processing of images. I’ve started reducing the size of my pictures before I send them to Flickr so that they don’t take too long to transfer. I make them 1500 pixels in width, which seems to work OK. I did one batch, and then tried to do another.

And my machine stopped. For quite a while. Eventually I killed the Photoshop export and tried to figure out what had happened. Turns out that the program remembers the number that you enter to resize your picture, but not the units. The program was busily creating a bunch of images 1500 cms wide. Or around 450 feet. This begs several questions.

  • Why does it just remember the number?
  • Has anyone ever really needed to produce a picture that big?
  • Did anyone ever test this?

Oh well.