[gburt2]

I just wrote a script with this that takes a directory of PSDs and outputs PNGs for each one. It took about 2 minutes. This is great.

[flixic]

Great, however, that was possible with ImageMagick before. Even more: ImageMagick can extract PSD layers as separate PNGs.

[elliottkember]

Sure. The difference is that with ImageMagick is getting all the flags right. Not to put down a powerful tool, but it isn't exactly memorable. In a script you can describe what's happening and customise it at any point without in-depth knowledge of the tool, and with a friendly CLI environment. I'd rather write 5 lines of Ruby than read up on the ImageMagick flags.

[rlpb]

I'd rather look up the ImageMagick flags and write a simple 5 line shell wrapper for my specific use case than learn an API and write Ruby.

[porker]

Could you provide your ImageMagick command, so we don't have to navigate the flag-infested waters?

[justinator]

Wow, everything old, is new again ;)

I think with an actual copy of Photoshop, and a little Applescript, this is something you could have done > 15 years ago.

[jdboyd]

But this way I don't have to keep paying $20/mo to Adobe CC so that I can run the script again next month.

[jlgreco]

I suspect that you could probably also manage it with GIMP/guile, but I don't suspect it would be particularly pleasant.

[_delirium]

If you want to script it, ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick are probably a better bet than trying to hack up something with GIMP batch processing: http://www.imagemagick.com/www/formats.html

If you just want to do basic conversion ignoring layers, it's quite easy:

   for f in *.psd; do
     convert "$f" "${f%%.psd}.png"
   done

[picomancer]

You can use find/xargs for this. It'll be faster because you can parallelize it with the -P option, for example, for a 4-core machine:

    find . -iname "*.psd" -print0 | xargs -0 -P 4 -n 1 -I I convert I I.png

For best results, change the number "4" in the above command to the number of cores you have.

[neeee]

The same with GNU Parallel, only it picks the right number of cores automatically and removes .psd from the file name:

  find . -iname "*.psd" -print0 | parallel -0 convert '{}' '{.}.png'

[jlgreco]

Oh excellent, I didn't know ImageMagick did PSD.

[toble]

Gimp's support for PSD is understandably poor for the more advanced/modern features, so I wouldn't rely on it without being able to compare the output to something else. I use Apple's Preview utility to manually compare results.

[sejje]

So maybe what's great is avoiding the cost of Photoshop, which many have found to be outrageous.

[Tmmrn]

  $ pacman -S applescript
  error: target not found: applescript
  $ pacman -S photoshop
  error: target not found: photoshop
  $ ruby --version
  ruby 2.0.0p247 (2013-06-27 revision 41674) [x86_64-linux]

Hm, which of those can I use?

[gurvinder]

Yes, but now you can do it without having a copy of Photoshop.

[muratmutlu]

How long did it take to output each PSD (if you have a rough file size for each that would be great to know)