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carbonmotion

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 28, 2004
983
0
San Francisco, CA
Hey guys,
I'm trying to find a free software that can resize alot of JPEGs without opening them. I have abour 4000 JEPGs from my digital camera and I don't have the time to scale them down one by one... is there a software out for mac that can resize many JPEGs all at once? Freeware is the best, ofcourse... thanks.

--CM
 
Photoshop can record actions and play them back on different images over and over. You could probably write an AppleScript to automatically open the files and tell Photoshop to resize them. I'm thinking that's about as good as it gets. It's hard to do anything to a file without opening it.

Before you do anything, why do you want to resize all of your images? If you just want to make smaller file sizes so you can store them I'd like to talk you out of that. You want to keep your full quality images so that you can use them in the future. You'll never get back what the compression will take away. Burn your originals to CD or something--but don't toss them and keep lower quality versions.
 
carbonmotion said:
Hey guys,
I'm trying to find a free software that can resize alot of JPEGs without opening them. I have abour 4000 JEPGs from my digital camera and I don't have the time to scale them down one by one... is there a software out for mac that can resize many JPEGs all at once? Freeware is the best, ofcourse... thanks.

What are the photos in now? I take it since there are so many they're not all still in your camera's card...even if you did the Muvo thing, I don't think they'd all fit in at once. :)

If they're in iPhoto already, there might be a relatively simple solution. You can go to the album they're in, select all (from the Edit menu), and then choose file->export. Then pick the file format and you can choose a "no-larger than" size which applies to all the photos. You choose a location and it will save all the files there, either with original filenames or "album - xxx" type names. All the photos will be scaled down either to the exact size you specified (if the aspect ratio is right) or until the wider dimension hits the one you specified (and the other one would be smaller).

This might even work if you don't have them in iPhoto yet (if you have 4.0 -- I heard that the previous ones didn't handle such large quantities of photos well). Import them all in and then do this. Might be best to do them about 500 or 1000 at a time. It wouldn't be interactive -- you just start the import, come back when its done & do the export, etc.

This might not work well for you if you want to scale differently for different pics though.

Otherwise it sounds like you really need a command line unix app. There might be something associated with GIMP....
 
hmm

mkrishnan said:
If they're in iPhoto already, there might be a relatively simple solution. You can go to the album they're in, select all (from the Edit menu), and then choose file->export. Then pick the file format and you can choose a "no-larger than" size which applies to all the photos. You choose a location and it will save all the files there, either with original filenames or "album - xxx" type names. All the photos will be scaled down either to the exact size you specified (if the aspect ratio is right) or until the wider dimension hits the one you specified (and the other one would be smaller).

you made me think of a way to do it..
iphoto can mail photos and reduce their size at the same time..
select a bunch, mail em, make em smaller.

go to sent items.. or drafts.. or whatever..

moo
 
Batch processing

Ok, I know you said "Free" but hopefully you already have this.
In Photoshop or Photoshop elements, you can go to batch processing to modify a ton of pics all at once.
Pic the folder that they are all in, set the new resolution, and tell it where to save the resized images. Just let it sit for a while, cause Photoshop will open every picture, resize, and resave it, but it will do it way faster than you can. Works like a charm
 
Graphic Converter

Graphic Converter really is good. I know it came free with the TiBook... I don't know about the new ones, though. Why don't you take a look at your apps folder?
 
technically, all apps will have to 'open' each file in order for it to modify it. Now whether the app displays the image it just opened is another matter. I believe the ImageMagick package (from fink) has a command line program called "convert" which has a resize option. Photoshop will display the image as it resizes it in the batch process.
 
smllpx said:
technically, all apps will have to 'open' each file in order for it to modify it. Now whether the app displays the image it just opened is another matter. I believe the ImageMagick package (from fink) has a command line program called "convert" which has a resize option. Photoshop will display the image as it resizes it in the batch process.

i second that. You can install Imagemagick directly without fink. Then you can manipulate images from the terminal

$ convert -sample 20% first.gif new_first.gif
would resize first.gif to 20% of its size as new_first.gif

for batch processing, goto the folder in which you have the pictures, and write the for loop
$ for i in *; do convert -sample 50% "$i" "new_$i"; done

this should do it.

Also there is a -resize handle inplace of -sample, where you can give the exact size of the new image.

cheers
 
Madmic23 said:
Ok, I know you said "Free" but hopefully you already have this.
In Photoshop or Photoshop elements, you can go to batch processing to modify a ton of pics all at once.
Pic the folder that they are all in, set the new resolution, and tell it where to save the resized images. Just let it sit for a while, cause Photoshop will open every picture, resize, and resave it, but it will do it way faster than you can. Works like a charm

Yeah,

Batch processes work like a charm.
 
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