Image Resizing Using Linux Command Line

Image resizing is one of those things in linux that should not be done using GUI. Better than GUI, there is a part of ImageMagick package for effective resizing of any image.

For resizing images, you need to have ImageMagick installed in your linux system. ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, TIFF, and DPX. You can use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bezier curves.

For ubuntu and debian based distros, type the following in console for installation:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Now, to resize any image, we can either use mogrify or convert command(these commands are far more complex and useful than just resizing, check man mogrify for more details of their functionalities.) that is part of ImageMagick suite.

For example, to resize an image you can use the following command:

mogrify -resize 50% image_name.jpg

That would reduce the size to 50% of the original size.

To resize to certain pixel, you can specify the expected dimension as below:

mogrify -resize 800x600 image_name.jpg

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Batch Image Processing Using GIMP

I've previously enlisted few tools regarding batch image resizing in windows. However they are limited to windows only and I was searching for something which was cross-platform. With some search, I found that GIMP loaded with David's Batch Processor would let us resize the images easily.

DBP (David's Batch Processor) is a simple batch processing plugin for the Gimp - it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files. Its main advantage is that the user does not have to learn a scripting language. Like the Gimp itself, DBP relies on a graphical interface. The user creates a list of images, and sets up the processing required for each image. The results of the current settings can be displayed. Once the required sequence of operations has been set up, DBP performs the same processing on each image in turn. The images can be colour corrected, resized, cropped, and sharpened, then renamed and saved to a different file in a specified image format.

Check official website for more information on installation and downloads.


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Bulk Image Resizing Tools For Windows

You will most likely find a situation when you need to resize multiple images at once. One example is while uploading pictures taken from high megapixel digital cameras. I had the same situation and googled to find few useful softwares for windows which I am going to list here.

1) Picture Resizer: An easy-to-use and free standalone tool for batch resizing of JPG pictures and photos. The tool is using high-quality resizing method, where color of each pixel is a weighted average of all covered pixels from the original image. Linear interpolation is used when zooming in. The algorithm is optimized to work with gamma-corrected pictures.

2) Fotosizer: Fotosizer is a free batch photo/image resizer tool. It lets you resize hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes in a quick and easy way. With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web.

3) Imagisizer: Imagisizer is absolutely the easiest, straight forward, image resizer and
converter around. It supports major image formats such jpg, png, gif and bmp. You need .NET framework for this tool to work which is bundled along with most moder Windows OS I guess.

4) PhotoResizer: Simple tiny sized batch resizing tools supporting multiple formats in input but only jpeg as output.

I hope some of these tools count useful for you as well like they did to me.


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Shutter : Advanced Screenshot Tool For Linux

The default screenshot tool in linux(I'm using ubuntu 10.10) does not have much features as some of you might have desired but there exists yet another tool known as Shutter that has lots of functionalities as a screenshot tool. Shutter is a feature rich screenshot tool available for many flavours of linux distribution.

With shutter, you can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window. There are numerous plugins written in Perl and bash included within the shutter as plugins and you can give different sexy looks to your screenshot. So for a blogger, writer and screen-sharer, this tool is a must if you are using linux.

To install shutter, either open the software centre according to your distro, search for shutter and install from there. For ubuntu, you can alternatively type the following from your terminal to install shutter:

sudo apt-get install shutter

To open shutter, click on Applications -> Accessories -> Shutter. Then you can use various features of shutter to take screenshots of window, selection, websites and full screen and then edit your screenshot, hide the sensitive areas and apply effects of your choice to the screenshots.

Some sample screenshots of the tool itself:

GUI of shutter:

Screenshot of website:

Screenshot of selection:

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Real time video capturing and benchmarking with FRAPS

Fraps is a universal Windows application that can be used with games using DirectX or OpenGL graphic technology. This application software can be used for real time video capturing and benchmarking.

In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as:

Benchmarking Software - Show how many Frames Per Second (FPS) you are getting in a corner of your screen. Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points. Save the statistics out to disk and use them for your own reviews and applications.

Screen Capture Software - Take a screenshot with the press of a key! There's no need to paste into a paint program every time you want a new shot. Your screen captures are automatically named and timestamped.

Realtime Video Capture Software - Have you ever wanted to record video while playing your favourite game? Come join the Machinima revolution! Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy! Fraps can capture audio and video up to 2560x1600 with custom frame rates from 1 to 120 frames per second!

Download Free Version

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Wally: Advanced Utility To Change Wallpaper

Wally is a Qt4 wallpaper changer using multiple sources like files, folders, FTP remote folders, Flickr, Yahoo!, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa and Smugmug images. It is available in many languages. Supported Linux window managers are GNOME, KDE 3, KDE 4, Xfce 4, BlackBox, FluxBox, Window Maker, and FVWM.

Features
· Runs on Win32, Linux and MacOSX platforms
· History support
· Many wallpaper layouts available on all platforms
· EXIF data available over picture and in system tray tooltip
· Save downloaded photos
· Proxy support

Wally Download Page

It is available in ubuntu repository so you can install easily from ubuntu software center.



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Install New Nvidia Driver 270.41.19 in Ubuntu

NVIDIA has released the new versions of unix drivers recently and many bugs have been fixed in this release.

To install this recent driver in ubuntu 11.xx, open the terminal and type the following:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

Also the packages are available for download from following links:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/270.41.19/

ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/270.41.19/





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Phatch : Batch photo processing GUI tool

Phatch(Photo + Batch) is an user friendly, cross-platform Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface. Phatch handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners, … and do much more actions in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually.

For more information on Phatch, you can visit HERE.

Overview

Actions: resize, rotate, invert, flip, watermark, shadow, rounded corners and much more!
Drag & drop of actions
Enable & disable actions
Can copy folder hierarchies
Python shell
Error logging
File history
Console (can run on servers without gui)
Desktop droplets
Image Inspector (exif & iptc)
Cross-platform (Linux, Windows & Mac)
python-api

File formats

Phatch supports the same file formats as PIL…

Read & write: 'bmp','dib','gif','jpe','jpeg','jpg','im','msp', 'pcx','png','pbm','pgm','ppm','tif','tiff','xbm'
Read only: 'cur','dcx','fli','flc','fpx', 'gbr','gd','ico','imt','mic','mcidas','pcd', 'psd','bw','rgb','cmyk','sun','tga','xpm'
Write only: 'eps','ps','pdf'

Color support

Phatch supports these color modes:

Monochrome (1-bit pixels, black and white)
Grayscale (8-bit pixels, black and white)
RGB (3x8-bit pixels, true colour)
RGBA (4x8-bit pixels, RGB with transparency mask)
CMYK (4x8-bit pixels, colour separation)
P (8-bit pixels, mapped using a colour palette)
YCbCr (3x8-bit pixels, colour video format)
I (32-bit integer pixels)
F (32-bit floating point pixels)


To install phatch under ubuntu, type the following in terminal:

sudo apt-get install phatch

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