Preserved Topic: using an action to save multiple versions of one image

hello and nice to meet everyone.<P>while i'm not new to photoshop, i am new to making complex actions and am not quite clear on the limitations of photoshop's automation abilities. with that said, here goes.<P>i am trying to greatly reduce my workload. i'm currently creating three images out of one main psd document. the differene mainly is that they are different sizes; small, medium and large. i have created an action that does the sizing, shadowing, etc... but what would make this project worthwhile would be if i could have the action save each individual image (save for web > jpg) with different filenames (append the letters a-b-c to the end of the filename. i'm not aware of any scripting for photoshop and don't see, with my knowledge, how this can be done or even if it can be done.<P>any help would be appreciated.
thanks.
bill.<P>btw, it's pshop 5.5 on a win2k box.

OK, I do this all the time, it's the only way to handle the heavy image load an e-commerce site generates, for instance. First off, forget altering the image name, that's a bitch. What's easy is saving them with the same filnames in DIFFERENT FOLDERS. This also makes it easy to deal with them from a database as well, you just need to store one image name with a product, and then the templates change the directory based on the size. I usually add an unsharp mask at each stage to keep the clarity of the images there as you go. I don't have an action handy here, and they need to be custom for your machine as the directory paths will be different, and seem to need to be hard coded, alas! Just do one image first. Open up the meta image and start recording your action. Svae it in a "raw" directory, resize it, save it in "large", resize, unsharp mask and save in medium, etc, and then close it. Stop recording. Now you can do a batch process on a folder full and hours of work happen in seconds! Gotta love Photoshop, yep.<P>

Another fantastically useful step for batch automating images for the web is the "fit image" command in the Automate menu. I was shooting posters for an ecommerce site that had a fixed pixel dimension allocated for each image. BUT - the posters were all different aspect ratios, and a mix of horizontal and vertical. "Fit Image" lets you say "Make the long dimension not exceed..." and "make the short dimension not exceed..." and you can take a whole folder of digital camera captures and turn 'em into thumbnail and detail views to size. It makes life bearable. I also found putting "stop" commands into actions great. Same project - some posters were skinny, some square, and they all had to be cropped to the printed area. When I get to the (for instance) crop step in the action it waits for me to draw out the crop, and then continues with al the other steps it doesn't need human input for. Putting in stops means you can't just walk away while it chugs along, but it still cuts the psychic damage repetition causes dramatically!

great suggestions, the fit image one would work well with what i'm doing as well as the saving in differentfolders - right now i just have the dialog boxes come up each time i need to save them.<P>i just need to create a batch file that could append a letter to the end of the filename in the folders. thanks so much for the suggestions.<P>-bill.