Have you ever needed to scale down a bunch of picture files to a smaller resolution?
If you used a GUI-based program such as gimp or Photoshop, and spent a reasonable time on that task, you'll surely appreciate this post. The same applies if you're not a slave on mice and thus prefer to open command-line terminals rather than double-clicks.
On Linux there is ImageMagick, a software suite that lets you create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc. We can use it to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bezier curves.
The most important feature to consider here is that ImageMagick includes a number of command-line utilities for manipulating images. That is, text-mode, no GUI needed for editing your images.
We say that ImageMagick can modify or create images automagically and dynamically!
For instance, to rescale (to 800 by 600 pixels) and lower the quality (by 70%) of a JPEG file, the following instruction can be used:
$ convert -scale 800x600 -quality 70 before.jpg after.jpg
Thus, suppose you have a directory hierarchy named source filled with your pictures and you need to create a similar structure but with thumbnails instead. The resulting directory will be called destin.
First of all, open a terminal. :D Then, change to source directory and create the new destin (in this example they're parallel):
$ cd source
$ mkdir ../destin
Second, create subdirectories on destin following the existing source structure:
$ find -type d -exec mkdir -p "../destin/{}" \;
If you wish, issue a tree or simple find command on destin just to check its contents.
At last, run find command along with convert in order to create thumbnails in batch mode:
$ find -type f -exec convert -scale 1024x768 -quality 85 "{}" "../destin/{}" \;
That's it, Power to the Shell! And a Happy 20th Anniversary, Linux!
