Bulk resizing of images?

Chriswaterguy · 10-06-2007, 10:44 AM

I want an image program to do bulk operations - mainly resizing, but also and basic manipulation (rotation, sharpening, changing brightness & contrast.).

When I was using Windows I found Easy Thumbnails from fookes.com to be very good (and it also seemed to give a much smaller filesize than some other programs, for an image of a comparable size and image quality). I'm currently running Easy Thumbnails on a USB stick on a windows machine - but it's not an ideal solution.

It would be great if I could do all this from within an album/viewing program - or even better, within the file manager. I know there are scripts that can be added to the right mouse button menu in a file manager, but I had trouble with the instructions; also, I would like to be able to modify the settings easily.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Chris
--
Semi-newbie
Running Xubuntu 7.04 on a Lenovo Thinkpad R60.

matthewg42 · 10-06-2007, 11:01 AM

If you don't mind using the terminal, you can use mogrify, which comes in the ImageMagick suite of tools. Mogrify can do rotation too.

The KDE program Gwenview has a batch processing option, which can do these things. Go to the Plugins menu -> batch processing -> resize.

If you use Gnome with Nautilus, there is an extension to do mass-resizing of images.

There are doubtless others.

Su-Shee · 10-06-2007, 01:59 PM

I also recommend Image Magick - this would really just be a simple shell loop and the image magick mogrify call, really easy going.

Chriswaterguy · 10-07-2007, 10:30 AM

Thanks for the suggestions!

ImageMagick: I'd rather use something with a GUI - partly as I'm a bit of a newbie (not convinced by the "really easy going"!) and partly because having a preview is so useful when doing even basic file manipulation.

Gwenview: I'm actually using Xubuntu, not Kubuntu, so that's a 19 MB download - not easy here in North Sumatra.

Nautilus: that's only a 4.5 MB download (tough 33 MB extra space). I will give this a try. I'd like to try an alternative to Thunar anyway, and I like the idea of having the image tools in the file manager. Just looking at the extensions now... nautilus-image-converter is available in Synaptic Package Manager, and explained at http://www.linux.com/feature/119029 - looks promising!

matthewg42 · 10-07-2007, 10:50 AM

Hello to you in Sumatra from me in England - I love how Linux brings people together from across the planet

christianunix · 10-07-2007, 11:43 AM

I have always loved XnView.

Su-Shee · 10-07-2007, 12:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chriswaterguy

Thanks for the suggestions!

ImageMagick: I'd rather use something with a GUI - partly as I'm a bit of a newbie (not convinced by the "really easy going"!) and partly because having a preview is so useful when doing even basic file manipulation.

Trust me, it really is and you'll going to appreciate it for bulk image editing. It's a Linux image editing must-have and is is simple exactly because it doesn't have a GUI.

Give it a try, it's anyhow part of all major distributions and works as a backend for several other image manipulation applications.

Tinkster · 10-07-2007, 02:31 PM

Using ImageMagick ... quite easy.

The way you use it is you cd into the directory with the files
you want resized, and invoke the script (I called it resize_pix
on my installation). It takes an optional parameter for the size.

You can see two size variables, one commented out. By default
(at the moment) it will down-scale all pix to 33% of their original
size, no matter what their initial size is. It will create a
subdir small if it doesn't exist yet, and put the files there.

At the moment it will only consider files with a lower case
jpg extension, but that's easily changed.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# size="1024x768"
size="33%"
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then 
    size="$1"
fi
if [ ! -a small ]; then
  mkdir ./small
fi
for pic in `ls -1 *.jpg`
do
#echo "$pic"
  convert -resize $size "$pic"  "small/$pic"
done

Cheers,
Tink