Slightly OT: Automating tasks between Photoshop (CS4) and Powerpoint

[PSA DC-9-30]

Hi,

I operate a scanning electron microscope that can run in automated mode and collect hundreds or thousands of images in an overnight run. These images are 8-bit tiff grayscale, and are approximately 1MP (they are only for mapping/specimen identification, not for "fine art" purposes). I need to find software that automate the following tasks:

1) Take all the images in the folder and flip them horizontally (left-right reverse them), and save them with modified names in a different folder or subfolder.
2) Paste each resulting image into its own slide in a Powerpoint presentation
3) Paste the filename of each image alongside the image on each slide.

Even if it is not possible to do all three in one swell foop, it would still be useful to know if they can be done individually.

Thanks for your help.
Kevin

[Jeremy Roussak]

I operate a scanning electron microscope that can run in automated mode and collect hundreds or thousands of images in an overnight run. These images are 8-bit tiff grayscale, and are approximately 1MP (they are only for mapping/specimen identification, not for "fine art" purposes). I need to find software that automate the following tasks:

1) Take all the images in the folder and flip them horizontally (left-right reverse them), and save them with modified names in a different folder or subfolder.
2) Paste each resulting image into its own slide in a Powerpoint presentation
3) Paste the filename of each image alongside the image on each slide.

You don't say what OS you're using. I imagine it would be pretty straightforward to do with AppleScript.

Even if it is not possible to do all three in one swell foop, it would still be useful to know if they can be done individually.

!!
It is said that a well-known Shakespearean actor once indulged in that Spoonerism. It didn't add to the anguish of the scene.

Jeremy

[PSA DC-9-30]

Vista 64 bit

[Ed Bacon]

I would do it in pieces, but I'm not sure how to put the pieces together.

For Part 1) flip, reverse etc. Create a Photoshop action by recording your key strokes, to open a file, do the edits and then save and close the file. (The last step close is important or you may exhaust memory!) Then in Bridge you can select all of the photos in the directory and use Tools | Photoshop Batch (or image processing). From the dialog that opens you can specify the action you just created, and you can also specify in which directory to place the results. Depending on the renaming algorithm, you can either rename them in the action when you save the edited file or use Bridge to rename the files once the Batch processing completes.

For Part 2) and 3) you can write VB Script to run from within PowerPoint. (Or you can write a little bit of .NET application code VB or C# that uses Office Automation.) The code would read the directory and for each file create a slide, insert the image and insert text with the filename.

Details of the above are left to the reader 

This is the part I do not know how to do:

• I do not know how to get Bridge to call a program other than Photoshop. If it could then I would chain the image processing with the PowerPoint script from Bridge.
  

OR

• I do not know of a way to open Bridge and have it automatically run a Batch process; I pretty sure there is a mechanism to open PowerPoint and have it run a VB script on startup. If could figure this out you could write either Windows script or good old bat file that takes your source directory and then either call it directory or via Windows scheduler.

I would do this in working chunks, that is get one part at a time to work, rather than try to do it all at once (e.g. create the PS action and run only from within PS, once that seems solid then call the action from Bridge, then work out the directories, etc). You might live a long a productive life without complete schedulable automation. Or you may come across a way to embed or script a "player" into a PP slide that would read the directory of images and dispay them -- that is worthless if you want to do something like generate a deck that you can edit (augment each slide).

[Ed Bacon]

Here is a link to a Microsoft Video on how to use .NET code to insert an image file to a new PowerPoint slide. There is a link on the video page to a detailed text description and sample code. I would modify the sample code to get a directory name and iterate over all of the image files, where the sample gets a single file name.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/en-us/office/media/video/office.html?cid=office-video&VideoID=4d25850b-82fc-40ab-a55b-e61cb7ff80ed&from=mscomoffice

[PSA DC-9-30]

Thanks everyone. I have the first step figured out--I just created an Action in Photoshop which does the horizontal canvas flip and saves images into another folder. I'll work on the rest next week.