Photographers often need to resize hundreds or even thousands of picture from time to time. Manually resizing each photographs one by one will ensure you do not get time to do any other things & missing submission deadlines. The solution to this answer is “Batch Resize”. As the name suggests, it means resizing photos in large quantities in one go. In this article, I’ll show you how to resize photographs in Digikam.
1) Open Digikam & navigate to the directory which hold the photographs you want to be resized. Select all using “CTRL +A”. Else you can select as per your preference.
2) Now click on “Batch Queue Manager” button below the menu bar. This will load the batch queue manager with the photographs you selected before. Under the “Base Tools/History” pane, navigate to “Resize” which can be found under “Transform”. Double-click “Resize” to add it to the “Assigned Tools” pane.
3) After doing the above you should see an option to set the width for the resized photographs. You can either select from the drop-down list or input the width dimension manually as per your preference. Once this is done, click “Run” button(below the menu bar) to start the resizing process. Digikam should begin with the resizing process & open up the history tab automatically showing you the progress.
You can grab a coffee or go for a stroll as Digikam resizes your photographs. Depending on the number of photographs & the processing power of your computer, the process may take sometime to complete. Once it is complete, you should get a prompt indicating it. All your resized photographs can now be found under the “Pictures” sub-directory under your home directory.
The real power of the Batch Queue Manager (BQM) is unleashed only if you combine the resizing with other steps. For example, I use BQM to prepare images for web export, for example to flickr and Picasa. This includes applying an unsharp mask after resizing to keep them crisp, colorspace conversion (because my editing/working color space is not sRGB), and converting to JPEG with a known quality and color subsampling settings.
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I agree. 🙂
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That’s why I like bash (put real inputs instead of XXX):
mogrify -scale XXX% -quality XXX% XXX.XXX
For instance, when I want to half the size and quality of pictures in my folder, I need to write:
mogrify -scale 50% -quality 50% *.jpg
The beauty of this is that I can apply it for more than just one folder.
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Thanks for the guide. Im developing a little script utility that uses Imagemagick for doing batch process. You can check it in my blog http://colorathis.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/artscript-v1-6-speeds-up-and-gains-power/
My script isn’t as sophisticated but you might find it useful.
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What I haven’t found in digiKam is how to batch resize images based on a percentage of their original size. I have a couple of hundred pictures to reduce in size by 50%. I could specfiy a width but some of the pictures are rotate 90 degrees so changing their width would not result in the rotate ones being reduced in size by the same amount as the non-rotated images. It would be nice if I didn’t have to leave digiKam and use convert or mogrify to do my resizing.
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