Simone Brunozzi

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Rants and thoughts by Simone Brunozzi, a technology evangelist (email: simone dot brunozzi a..t gm4il)

May 25, 2008

Bulk resize images with GIMP

I shot a couple of dozen pictures in Seattle yesterday, and I wanted to put them on Flickr. Problem is that Flickr has a monthly upload bandwidth limit, and my Canon EOS 400D creates 3382×2259 images, but for Flickr a 1200×800 should suffice; therefore I decided to resize them before uploading.
How to do that with a batch process, rather than by hand?

I came up with a nice solution using GIMP (for Linux Ubuntu, but it’s valid for other Linux flavors as well).
Here’s how.

Install the package gimp-plugin-registry, which includes also David’s Batch Processor (name says all).

gimp

Now open Gimp, go to Xtns, and then click “Batch Process…“.

gimp

Here you can configure the details, expecially:
- which images you want to convert (”input” tab)
- how you want to resize them (”resize” tab)
- the type and quality of output images (in the “output” tab)
- renaming (you can’t overwrite the original files; choose a different directory for output).

gimp

It works!

Check them out on my flickr page (pictures have a friendly CreativeCommons license, you can use them).

Category: grok

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9 Responses

  1. Aldo says:
    25/05/2008 at 23:53

    Hi Simone, :)

    nice tip… but perhaps this package is only in Heron’s repos?

    Anyway, I use imagemagick to perform this operation. Once installed, you can easily make several operations, such as resize. Just type in a terminal (pointing in a folder where the images to be resized are located):
    mogrify -resize 1200x1200 *.jpg

    This command resizes all the .jpg files (and overwrites them), putting them in a square of 1200×1200 pixels, and keeps the right orientation (landscape or portrait) of the photos. The result is a proper resizing of all the images in a snap.

    Hope this can be another useful tip. ;)

    Bye,
    Aldo

  2. Lee Provoost says:
    26/05/2008 at 10:47

    Hi Simone, have a look at the Flickr uploader tools: http://www.flickr.com/tools/

    Cheers, Lee

  3. Keith says:
    19/07/2008 at 23:03

    Those two solutions sounded great, but the extension did not work for me at all. Two complex errors came up about something to do with the filenames.

    The second, imagemagik, I could not find in the Ubuntu repos, so I’m still looking for a solution to bulk image editing!

    Thanks,

    Keith

  4. Rod says:
    15/08/2008 at 19:38

    Sounds nifty. Any idea if this is available for that *other* o/s?

  5. Rob Searles says:
    14/01/2009 at 15:00

    Great, thanks for this. I don’t quite “get” gimp, but managed to batch resize images after finding this post, so thank you.

  6. Anthony Sangiuliano says:
    14/02/2009 at 05:34

    as for that “other” os, i installed cygwin on vista, installed imagemagick and the mogrify command works splendidly. I resized about 500 images for a digital frame and they look fantastical!

  7. charlie says:
    08/05/2009 at 19:34

    That seems overkill for something simple like resizing images :)

    Try the imagemagick tools

  8. Mimor says:
    31/08/2009 at 16:07

    Indeed, as Aldo pointed out, imagemagick tools are somehow a little easier to use.
    I have this folder with like 200 x14MP pictures, and that’s too much for gimp (or my computer) to handle ;)

  9. Nick says:
    13/09/2009 at 08:07

    Thanks for the tip
    In the new gimp, it’s under filters – batch
    Handy option to add file pre/postfixes too ….

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