Modern digital cameras create ridiculously huge photos. The most common resolutionthese days is 1366×768.
Its cumbersome to make my slideshow program resize 4912x7360 images to fit on a 1366×768 monitor. Theres about a 8 to 10 second delay in my slideshow software while it reads the image and resizes the image for my screen. Thumbs Plus gets cranky when I press the space bar too fast. It just can’t read these huge images that fast.
I’ll keep the original images on a dvd. I want to resize them all for my hard drive.
Any software recommendations? Something very simple. Select a folder, enter a percentage (like 60%), keep the original aspect ratio, and click OK. Go get a cup of coffee and find several hundred images resized when I get back.
I saw that review from 2008. I was going to install BIMP Lite when I realized it hadn’t been update since 2008. Its an XP program and it seems like the developers web site has disappeared.
IrfanView looks a whole lot like Thumbs Plus. Same features, thumbnails, slideshow, basic editing. Except AFAIK Thumbs Plus doesn’t have a batch mode. I’ve used Thumbs Plus since 1997.
It’s Mac-only, but GraphicConverteris the gold standard for the kinds of tasks you’re describing. It is literally as easy to use as you describe in the OP. It’s well worth the $40, but you can try it out as shareware.
JPEG is old as hell and it shouldn’t matter if the software was designed for XP or even Windows 95. The file format hasn’t changed much since then, and a batch converter should still work.
Edit: IrfanView in fact dates back to 1996. It’s received minor updates since then but is still pretty much the same program, with the same archaic interface, but people still use it because it’s powerful, fast, and free.
I set a couple options. The slideshow needed to cycle back to the first photo. Fixed that. I set the option so the program opens with the last folders I used.
I even tested the batch resize with a few photos. Easy to use.
The only weird thing is it won’t let me open more than one photo at a time. Even photoshop lets you open multiple images. Strange that this program won’t do that. Maybe its restricted until I make a donation?
Change the setting from ‘thumb’ to ‘list’ or ‘details’ & when you open that folder, you will have all pics in that files and you can just do an add all, they move to the lower right window box & hit ‘start batch.’
I use Irfanview because Windows’ photo viewer doesn’t make use of EXIF rotation data (?? Microsoft). You don’t need any additional program in OS X. Automator is like a GUI batch file editor.
Picasa will do that, too. You can select a whole bunch of pictures and export them out at any resolution you want. Just in case Irfanview isn’t your cup of tea.