How to put loads of images into one Photoshop file quickly

Hey there, this video we're going to take a bunch of files that we've done. I've got all these kind of like screen shots, things that I really like, and I just want to kind of add them to a Photoshop file in one big go rather than copy and pasting them. So I'll show you the feature that just dumps them all into one Photoshop file. All the layers easily, and then I'm just going to make it into a kind of a Mood board. I do this all the time when I'm getting kind of ideas for projects, and especially if I have to deal with a client, I show them a Mood board like this, to say, "This is not my work, this is what I'm looking to do", "Have I understood your brief right?" And it can really kind of save time, they might look at this and go, "That is not what we want." With the Comic Sans. All right, let's go and do it now. 

To get started all you need to do is, you don't have to have anything open. It doesn't really matter what Photoshop looks like, might be work, might be learn. What we need to do is go to 'File', and go down to 'Scripts', and there's this one, it says 'Load Files into Stack'. You can choose whether you want to select the files, or load a whole folder, I'm just going to click 'Files'. Click 'Browse'. In your '03 Preferences and Workflow', let's click on the 'Inspiration 1', hold 'Shift', and click on 'Inspiration 7', so we've got them all selected, click 'Open'. Kick back and relax. Not yet. Click 'Open'. And you can decide, like for me, like I said at the beginning, we're doing kind of inspiration Mood boards. I've just taken screen shots all over the place, and there's one, I load them into 'Files'. 

You might be, say capturing something on a tripod that's maybe moving, and you want to like attempt to align the images. They all kind of line up exactly. Mine are just all very different images, so it's not going to work. So I'm using it one way but there are lots of other times we're like, actually just want to dump lots of images into a Photoshop file. And you might want to try and line them up. Maybe it's different exposures you've done of one image, or some sort of time lapse. You can decide where you want to lump it all together as a Smart Object at the end. I don't want to do either of those things, I want to kick back, relax, and watch Photoshop do it all, because the alternative is 'File', 'Open', and then copy, paste, copy paste, copy paste, close, copy paste. Copy paste, close, did you want to save? Ah, it's drama. Cool, huh? 

You see over here, my Layers file, I've got a bunch of images all just laid up together. You can see the names of the files there, and what I want to do, for my kind of Mood board here, is I've grabbed my Crop tool, I'm just going to drag this out over here. I have no idea how big it's going to be. Hit 'return'. And I'm just going to kind of slowly move them out. And what I do when I'm doing a Mood board is to decide how big I want different things, in terms of like, say I'm sending it to the client about my ideas about what we're doing, there'd be some things that I'll accept prominent, and some things that are just kind of subtle, and I use kind of size to show how kind of, I guess, important you feel to the overall theme, different things are. 

So I like this kind of, like cobbled together, overlapping, nothing is really-- like it's not-- they're not your designs, right? So it's just kind of giving it an idea or a mood of what you want to do. So I might say something like that. I drag it about there as well. And that's what-- I guess we've learnt how to load stack pretty quickly. Now I'm just showing you what I do in terms of-- I'm going to make a new layer. It's going to be at the bottom. I'll fill it with, probably not black, I'll pick grayish, gray green. And I'm going to select all these fellas and put a Drop Shadow on them. 

Now weirdly you can't add a Drop Shadow into them all at once. You can use our trick where you put a folder, add a Drop Shadow to the folder and stick them all in. We're totally getting off topic now, but hang around, there's a tip in here somewhere. So I'm going to give it a size. You can see, how with them all in a group I can add a Drop Shadow to that group. And you can see they all get it there, and that might be what you want. What I want though is I want them individually to have shadows. So I'm going to 'Step Backwards' until I got rid of that group. I'll add Drop Shadow to one of them. 'Drop Shadow'. And I'll go to here, this size. That will do. Then you right click one of them or the one you've got the Drop Shadow on. 
Go 'Copy', then you can apply them all by selecting these other six here, right clicking, and say 'Paste Layer Style'. Now they've all got individual Drop Shadows, rather than all in one group. It's up to you what you want to do, right? You might play with the layers. Bring this one to the front, on maybe over these guys, get this kind of like, I don't know, mixed up collage Mood board thing going. Shortcuts for moving things up and down, say I want this to be at the front now, I want it to be there, but I want it in the front, 'Command Shift', and the second of the square brackets ']'. That's 'Ctrl-Shift-]' on a PC. Square brackets are the ones next to the P key. Brings all way to the front. And that first one, which needs to be all the way to the back, which is behind my gray box, not what I want. 

I'm going to select them all except for that background. I just kind of move them in there, and there's Dan's Mood board. Now other little tips-- where I get my inspiration from generally, say I'm doing, like this here is my kind of UI design Mood board. I find most of it is from something called Dribbble. Dribbble with three Bs. I've typed in UI here, and it's just-- the curation of the site is pretty amazing. It is bit of work, you can find all sorts of stuff. There's a very kind of Dribbble feel to it, but it's often stuff that I can really relate to. You can start following people, you can upload your stuff here. 

Another really good place - it has a really different kind of look to it - is Behance. Dribbble and Behance for some reason just have different kind of vibes in terms of their quality, well not the quality, the style. Dribbble has this very, more kind of illustration clean vector, like computer created graphics, whereas Behance is-- tends to be a lot more of this type of stuff, where there is a mixture of that, but there's a kind of, I don't know, there's a different vibe to it. Lot more pixels and grunginess in Behance. Up to you, hopefully one of those is new to you. The other thing I want to show you before I go, is because of Niice; Niice with two Is. We love extra letters. Niice is free to sign up, and you create your own boards. 

Basically just Mood boards, so this is one I was doing some hand lettering, and I wanted ideas, so instead of dumping it into Photoshop I dumped them into this program here, and the cool thing about it is, it makes kind of resizing really quick and easy, can you see this? So I can go, you, I want you to be a smaller part of this. And it does pretty cool cropping. And allows you to kind of, say I like this one, I want to make it bigger. It gets really big, it's very cool. You can export these as PDFs as well. Share them with a client like this. Very, very cool. You get a couple of boards free, and then you have to pay; it's pretty cheap. You should totally sign up for these guys. I love Niice. That is going to be us. I will see you in the next video.