software suggestion?

[jmadero]

Hi All,

So I have a suggestion for software for anyone up to the task. It's actually just adding a GUI to an already existent program (Imagemagick). My reason for asking to begin with is that my mom has a camera that takes really sweet pictures but the image sizes are huge (like 2 megs a pic), I have debated off and on if I should down the resolution but I'm sure as soon as I do she'll take a picture that she wants blown up to a 100"X285" (exaggeration but you get the point). She's not very tech savvy so teaching her how to up and down the resolution on the camera is probably not going to work (even if I did she'd forget to down it or up it when she wants to). I have been manually using imagemagick to convert whole folders of pictures for her (typically dropping them to about 60% of original size). A nice easy GUI that I could teach her would be very sweet to say the least.

Not sure how hard this would be or if it is even in demand, although I did google Imagemagick GUI and there seems to be quite a bit of posts asking about it.

Thanks all

[GNU-Fan]

There is an easy widget toolkit that is very suited to wrap shell scripts with a GUI. It is called tk and is used together with the tcl programming language.

Tcl Developer Site

TkDocs - Tk Tutorial

[danielsmw]

Is 2 MB per picture seriously an issue? Maybe you should get her a better storage device. But besides that... is she on windows or linux? Either way, programs like Picasa, F-Spot, or iPhoto generally have features where you can export images at lower resolutions to save space, and I imagine this is pretty easy to do as a batch operation.

[i92guboj]

A simple solution would be to use a bash script, and then link it to a button on your desktop panel or to an icon on your desktop, whatever fits her.

Something like this:

#!/bin/bash

DIR="$HOME/images/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)"
mkdir -p "$DIR"

# You obviously need to adjust the following,
# it might not even be needed depending on
# how you you mount your removable devices
mount /mnt/camera 

# You need to adjust the path here, and probably the extension
# of the files
find "/mnt/camera" -name '*.jpg' | while read image
do
  convert "$image" -resize 60% "$DIR/$(basename "$image")"
done && xmessage "All the images have been resized and copied to $DIR."

Save it on a plain text file, chmod u+x it so it's executable, and then link it to a button on your taskbar, a icon, a key binding or whatever you want.

You can substitute xmessage with kdialog or the native tool of your desktop to display messages on the screen if you want a nicer popup.

[jmadero]

Thanks for all the help, I will check out the last bash today and see if that suits her needs.

As for the comment about 2 megs per picture, it's not her side that is the issue (although it is a bit of an older machine, none the less I'm not buying new stuff so she can take pictures). But the main issues are: 1. Emailing 2 meg pictures can become a pain for many reasons, including that some of the people she sends to still have dial up (downloading 2 megs on dialup to see a single photo is no fun), also for people not using an email that has a large quota if she sends a ton of photos it is just filling up their email.

Also she uses picasa web albums and they don't give a ton of space so she has one album up right now and it's already taking up almost 40% of the space allocated. Making it 60% of the current size keeps the photos big enough to look clear and makes it so she can upload more than 50 pictures before having quota issues.

[smolloy]

Gimp can also do this. Open the image you want to resize, right-click on it, select "image", then "scale image", and set the image to the size you want.

Of course, this isn't a very efficient way to process large numbers of images in one go, but I thought it might be a nice easy way for a non-techie to do it.