Maintaining Pixel Aspect Ratio in Batch Processing

[RichardPatterson]

I have 469 large .psd images for which I want to make low resolution .jpg files.  I have tried twice and each time some of the images end  up being squeezed or stretched. The original images vary in size and aspect ratio.  Some are portrait, some are landscape.  What I have tried to do is set a macro to so that the width of any height of any image is reduced to 240 pixels with the Height and Width locked.  This only seems to work properly on images having the same H:W ratio as the one open when I record the macro.

Is there any solution to this in Affinity?  I am fairly certain I did this numerous times in Photoshop before I switched to Affinity.  

I am running Affinity 1.8.6 on Mac OS 11.0.1.

Thanks

Edited November 20, 2020 by RichardPatterson

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

It's very difficult to do that with macros, because the obvious approaches all remember the actual dimensions, and will cause distortion as you noticed.

But you don't need to use a macro. Just specify a width of 240 px directly in the batch job parameters, and leave the height unspecified. Leave Preserve Aspect Ratio (A) checked, and it should just work.

[RichardPatterson]

Thank you!  I had seen the H & W boxes but had no idea how they worked.  It would be nice if the documentation were a little more detailed.

[RichardPatterson]

49 minutes ago, RichardPatterson said:

Thank you!  I had seen the H & W boxes but had no idea how they worked.  It would be nice if the documentation were a little more detailed.

  

Edited November 21, 2020 by RichardPatterson

[RichardPatterson]

I ran a batch that converted all the images to .jpg and resized them all to 240 high while preserving the aspect ratio.  Now my problem is that the images are 1200 dpi and I need to use them in a data base which now sees them as so small as to be unrecognizable.  I need to change the dpi to 72.  I have tried several times running a batch with a macro which resets the dpi without resampling the image, but it seems to alter the aspect ratio of the some of the images for reasons I cannot fathom.  I admit to be very confused by all this, but surely a macro to reset dpi without resampling should not alter the image aspect ratio.

Edited November 21, 2020 by RichardPatterson

[walt.farrell]

32 minutes ago, RichardPatterson said:

I have tried several times running a batch with a macro which resets the dpi without resampling the image, but it seems to alter the aspect ratio of the some of the images for reasons I cannot fathom.  I admit to be very confused by all this, but surely a macro to reset dpi without resampling should not alter the image aspect ratio.

No, it shouldn't. But sometime after 1.6 a bug crept in that causes that to happen when you record a macro. Check the thread below for some macros that should work: