Batch resizing of photos

This is summer in the northern hemisphere and vacation time for lots of us. I love taking loads of photos with my digital camera and sharing the best ones with my friends and on Facebook.  Apart from selecting any photo that might be worth sharing, there is a size problem. My D3200 Nikon can create individual files of up to 13MB!

What I do is firstly select those I want to share and copy them to a separate folder. I have made the mistake in the past of working on the original file and ruining it! I then resize the photos but it is tedious doing it one by one so do them all at once in a batch process. The program I use depends on which operating system I am using.

In Windows my favourite resizer is FastStone Photo Resizer. I use it to resize and rename the files at the same time. You navigate to the folder where the photos are then select as many as you want. You then make your selection as to what you want to change – and also select a separate destination folder so the originals don’t get overwritten by the processed pictures.

In Linux (but also available for Windows) a very quick solution to resizing photos is using GraphicsMagick. It is a powerful image processor used by, amongst other stellar names, the heavy duty photo repository Flickr.  It isn’t like any photo manipulating most people use as, surprisingly, it hasn’t got a graphical interface. You just use the terminal program to type in the commands. You firstly need to navigate in the terminal to the folder where the photos are – ones you have copied – don’t do this to your original photos! Once there I type in:       gm mogrify -scale 50% D*.JPG.  This scales all the JPG photos in the folder, reducing the length and the height by 50% each – which really leaves me with a photo that is 25% of the original size.

Another photo batch processor  is IrfanView which is also a very good photo editing suite. It is built for Windows but can also run on Linux using the WINE Windows emulator. See the FAQ section in the IrfanView website for more details.

 

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