I think I asked this question on another board a while ago, so I thought I'd ask it here.

Is there such a thing as a program that can do batch editing on images? Say I've taken 50 pictures, and for publishing to the web I want to make thumbnails of all of them. I use PSP5.01 for image editing, and as much as I like is and can use the keyboard shortcuts, resizing all those pictures takes a lot of time.

Is there any type of program for this?

You already own the program. PSP5!

File -> Automate -> Web Photo Gallery

EDIT: Maybe spoke too soon. I am using 5.5. I assume this feature is in all PSP5.x

Nope! But thanks anyway! Seems like a fairly large thing to include in a revision increase from 5.1 to 5.5. oh well. Any other ideas?

Update your Photoshop for starters.

You can also use ACDSee with its batch plugin.

You can also use DeBabelizer.

ACDSee is probably the cheapest option. Though you may be able to get a low-priced upgrade to your Photoshop. Even if you don't have the Automate command, you do have Actions in all versions of 5 I believe. You can make an action for any common tasks you need to perform. That will save a lot of time on its own. Of course the batch abilities give you unmatched speed.

Bruno

hehe, thanks, but wrong again! I seem to have a ghetto version of PSP with absolutely no features whatsoever

I'll look into those other programs. I was hoping to get some solution for free, but oh well!

Crap, I must have been blinking mid-character. Or trying too hard to watch TV at the same time. I only now noticed you were talking about PSP (JASC Paint Shop Pro) and not PSHOP (Adobe Photoshop)

Bruno

Hah, okay, that makes sense

I never got the hang of Photoshop. I don't know what it is. Adobe doesn't make the most me-friendly products I've used Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere, and all seem to have the same advanced UI that I just can't get into. I like my nice simple PSP. I know it can do more, but when I don't want it to, it's easy to use.

You're not the only one. I thought he was talking about Photoshop also. Sorry about the confusion I probably created.

About.com seems to have good info about freeware to make a web photo gallery.
http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/webgallery/

ImageMagick can do this...

http://www.imagemagick.org/

Check out Adobe Elements. It is a lite version of PhotoShop that comes with many digital cameras these days. The reviews in the image edition magazines have been very good for this program....it's also cheap.

Okay, I know you dismissed using Photoshop, but really it is very easily done when using the program. You can make a key (like F3) a shortcut to doing an "action". For your example, you can keep hitting F3 after you define your "action" for all your photos and they will be smaller. I know you don't like Photoshop, but here is a link in case you want to pursue:
http://adobedoc.kanisasolution.com/Photoshop6/c19au2.htm

If you're dual booting with linux I believe you could do something like this with script-fu using gimp. I've never done it myself, but it may be an option.

p.s. I think they've ported gimp to windows, but don't quote me on it.

In reply to:

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p.s. I think they've ported gimp to windows, but don't quote me on it.

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You're correct. Gimp has been ported to Windows.

Edit: You'll find it here.

We use Gimp here at work to do batch conversions for texture files with some sort of scripting. I don't know the details since that's not my job, but i hear the techs talking about it over the cube walls =]

Acutally, it gets even easier in PhotoShop6. You can assign your saved sequence to a batch of files. You then have the option of replacing the original files with the newly converted (always a bad idea...why they even give you the choice is beyond me), or save the new files to someplace you specify.

I do this all the time for a friend of mine that has an online photo gallery. It is very simple and totally automated. The only drawback is the price of PhotoShop. Corel PhotoPaint can do the EXACT same thing for half the price. And Corel is becoming a clone of Adobe now (evern since v9). They heven have an Adobe interface emulator!

One more product to add to the list...

I use IrfanView to do this type of thing (I do mass resize/thumbnail creation from my digital camera's pictures often) and I really, really like this application (and it's free).

http://www.irfanview.com

Okay, here's where I am:

- PSP5.01 has no way of doing this
- I discovered that my camera did in fact come with PShop 5.0 (LE), but this version doesn't have any such features as "automate" or "action" as far as I can tell
-I tried Irfan or whatever it was, and it will do some of what I want, but not really (explained below)
-I tried GIMP, but forget that program for me besides, I couldn't really find any way to do it

What many programs I've seen out there want to do, is automate a batch conversion with very few options specifically for creating thumbnails on the web. While I do want to do this, that's not all I want to do. I want to be able to take a directory with 50 images in it (all of same or different size), and change their size to 320x240 or even better, reduce by percentage (for vertical shots from camera and for scanned images). This is just an example, but it is something that I'll want to do. As of now I don't really see any good options for this, besides spending hundreds of dollars on Paintshop. I'm going to keep looking around the freeware programs and see if I can find anything

See if ACDSee have an evaluation version of their Robo plugin. And if you like it and ACDSee, buy it. The plugin will also work with PicaView whicih is cheaper than ACDSee (but obviously not as feature rich).

You can see what it does on their website [ur]www.acdsystems.com[/url] - it has been what I consider the best and fastest image viewing applet for over 6 years.

And back onto expensive solutions... Photoshop can definitely do what you want. I'd never buy it for batch usage alone - that's something too specialized to spend that kind of money on.

You might also want to check out Debabelizer as I suggested earlier. It's all about conversion and batch manipulation.

Bruno

http://www.filehouse.com/au2thumbspro/
http://www.pawsitesonline.com/ezthumbs/
http://www.tucows.com/mmedia/thumbnail95.html
http://www.simplythebest.net/thumbnail.html

I'm sure there are more, but those should keep you busy for a bit

Ok I really don't know what I'm missing, then, because unless I'm completely misunderstanding what you're after, IrfanView does what you want. From IrfanView I go to File >> Batch Convert/Rename and get a whole mess of options. By clicking the Advanced Options button on the right side, you get choices for a whole mess of nifty options, including resizing to specified dimensions, or by percentages..isn't that what you're talking about? Or am I confused?

Anyhoo...I'm sure you'll find a program that works for you...IrfanView works great for me because it's powerful, small, and completely free.

I was using Utah Raster Toolkit for such tasks, but it is a set of Unix command-line utilities. You might be able to compile it on Windows without too much problems using cygwin.

I never found one fast enough that worked from windows command prompt, needed to resize 300,000+ images for our website (www.chaosmusic.com). wrote a 80 line java program to do it, as java has a very cool jpeg class

Cheers

Sam

I appologize, I just couldn't find that! Thanks so much! I'm testing it right now. The help file didn't have anything about that ability that I could find.

Looks like I have what I need. Yet another problem solved by the wonderful and helpful people on the empeg message board.

I use GraphicConverter for that, but then I'm one of those Macintosh heathens.

I've used a program called Thotor. It will batch create your thumbnail images and create an HTML index page of the thumbnails linked to the full-sized images. It has options for the size of the thumbnails as well as wether or not to keep them in their original aspect ratio. Found it really handy for making those 'photo gallery' pages for all my digital images as I could just import the generated index page, thumbnails and photos into my website after Thotor had done it's thing.

It can be found at http://www.dominativ.com/thotor/

Thanks, guys. But once again, thumbnails wasn't the only thing I was going for. I found a large number of programs to make thumbnails and automate the web process. Unfortunately, I didn't find any that couldn't simply resize the image.

You see, with a 4 megapixel digital camera, a end up with an image 2000+ pixels wide. obviously, this isn't a picture for the internet. I needed a program that could trim it down to a reasonable size, particularly for a student organization web site with parents who probably have their monitors at 800x600 or *shock* 640x480!

To whoever mentioned Irfanview, I used it to do what I wanted, and was pleased with the speed. However, the results were suprisingly poor! The image quality was terrible after the resize. I'll try to post an example later.

Back in the old DOS days, I used to use a program called "Graphic Workshop" by a gentleman named Rimmer that worked great for batch image processing. Anyone know what's become of that one?

That's not the one by those Pagan guys that I can't remember the name of right now, is it? Then again, there have probably been a dozen or more programs with the name "Graphic Workshop" on multiple OSes.

Bruno

I know nothing about "Pagan Guys", but the author's name was, as I recall Steven Rimmer.

Ah, here they are:

http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html

Back in the old DOS days, Graphic Worksop was one of the few programs which did true batch processing of image.

Alchemy Mindworks, that's right. Same pagan guys. Take a look at the site. They also make the Pagan Day Book if I'm not mistaken.

Bruno

Hehe, he's got an espionage thriller out

Speaking of pagan guys, please welcome satan, who is our newest member!

ThumbsPlus does the job for me. You may find it well worth the purchase price... or you may find a crack for it.

Do a batch process and select an input folder/file/selection and transform them all to 50% horizontal and 50% vertical (or whatever % you need) and you are on your way. It also has a thumbnail HTML page generator which lets you click on the thumbnail to bring them up full size.

Any more questions, feel free to ask... I've actually got picture pages on the net using the software.