How to...

sjt269 · 24 Sep 2007 at 19:59

...resize and crop 80 small thumbnail images without doing them all individually?

I'm redoing the gallery for my website (and the music page, eventually), with the help of a web-design-student friend (who can do more in 10 lines of code than I can in 200, which is genuinely no understatement - that's what he's done with the new gallery code) and the thumbnail images are all square. This is a problem, as all my thumbnails are currently rectangles (gallery is in sig) and they all have black borders around them. I can't have them all as rectangles, as some are landscape and some portrait, which looks untidy, and the code currently squishes them into squares so that they look all distorted (not on the gallery atm, on a test page). I'm really busy just now with all sorts of different things, and I don't really have time to do this all by hand, as it were. I've only got Photoshop Elements and the Fuji software that came with my camera, so is there any way I can automate this whole process?

Thanks in advance
tTz

sjt269 · 25 Sep 2007 at 15:33

robertgilbert86 said:
Lightroom could do this rather well.

I'm sure it could, if I had it.

whitecrook said:
Imagemagick. It was built for this kind of thing. You could even do photo resizeing and image manipulations on the fly with it if that's your thing.

I shall look this up. Had a look at Irfranview too, but never got a chance to play with it.

sjt269 · 25 Sep 2007 at 16:50

-=BAF=-AXE said:
PaintShopPro

Which I also do not have.

:edit:

And perhaps I'm being really, stunningly thick, but I can't see how to get Imagemagick to do what I'm wanting it to do. Any help? It doesn't seem to work properly on my PC anyway, getting a lot of wierd error messages.

sjt269 · 26 Sep 2007 at 19:29

-=BAF=-AXE said:
Invest in some somftware would be the answer

I'd be glad to, if I had any money to spare. And I really dislike pirating software, so I'd rather not go that route.

I've downloaded a 30-day trial of Lightroom, and I'll have a play with that. Failing that, I'll do it the good old fashioned way, and spend hours and hours playing with Photoshop, cropping each individual pic.

sjt269 · 26 Sep 2007 at 21:05

ChroniC said:
Photoshop is capable of batch processing crops and resizing, just move the portrait and landscape shots into 2 different folders.
Why would u want to crop 2 photos the same?

It's only Elements that I'm using, and I want to crop eighty photographs exactly the same because it's for my website, and the thumbnail images will all have to be perfectly square. My pictures are currently rectangle, and manually doing eighty will take an annoyingly long time, and I'm really busy at the moment. The gallery is started, but not finished - the code is done, I just need to do the crops, make sure the code all points to the right things, and play around with a layout. The 'old' gallery no longer works properly due to the changes I've made, and I don't want to leave it in a half finished state.

:edit:

I've found a batch process option in Photoshop, but it doesn't appear to have a crop function.

sjt269 · 27 Sep 2007 at 16:11

messiah khan said:
Make an action, then run this as a batch.

I have no idea how to do this, but I'll take a look.

whitecrook said:
what exactly is the op cropping?

The OP wants to crop the images to squares.

And thanks for the other suggestions too guys, I'll take a look.

:edit:

boycee said:
Porta to be honest!

That's a really great little program, but it doesn't crop the images. It just resizes them so that the largest edge is the size I tell it to go to, and preserves the aspect ratio - ie the pics are all still rectangles, when I need them to be square. Thanks for pointing out that program though, that's one little gem that's not moving from my hard drive. At least, not until I find a better tool for the job.

sjt269 · 27 Sep 2007 at 19:25

That worked great, I just got the sizing a little wrong and ended up with borders on two sides of each picture (either horizontal or vertical depending on alignment of the image), so I went and changed the settings, and now the program keeps crashing. Grr. I'm going to try and reinstall and pray that it works.

:edit:

Grr again. I can't get the size to be anything other than 65, changing the option has no effect whatsoever. I'm just trying to get rid of these annoying partrial borders now.