Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Phatch

If you've ever tried to find the batch processing features in The Gimp, you'll probably have worked out that they don't exist. Phatch might be of use for you if you want to edit more than one image at a time. It's a photo batch processing application that could save you quite a bit of time. It includes:

4 comments:

  1. I'm a great fan of IrfanView (http://irfanview.com) - also includes batch processing, plus slideshow, lots of photo control, filters, etc. Worth a look! (Free for personal use and for educational use).

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  2. Irfanview fantastic, I use it myself, but it doesnt run under linux. You can install the 'gimp-plugin-registry' package which will add a batch processor to the filters.

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  3. Unfortunately, IrfanView is not Open Source, nor is it Free Software. The zero-cost version is licensed to restrict sharing the software, and you cannot use it as part of a business. That is what "personal and non-commercial" means.

    GIMP does have a batch process mode, and a script-fu console, just to help with repeated operations. If you don't like that, there is ImageMagick, which can be used in scripts alongside common file manipulation commands and other script languages. These two approaches are more powerful and flexible than Phatch, a point made on the phatch website. However, they also require commandline use.

    Part of GIMP design philosophy is that users will create plugins for wanted features - particularly for things that are scriptable, like batch processing or panorama creation. Not everyone can script, or wants to, though.

    Part of the Free Software philosophy is that users will share their programs. This means that popular functions are often available as plugins from your GNU/Linux repository (windows users will have to hunt online). It is worth firing up synaptic or yum-extender and having a look.

    Ubuntu/debian have a batch processor, which works much like phatch, included in the gimp-plugin-registry package. A panorama editor (subject of another post) called Pandora is in a seperate package.

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  4. Thank you Simon. Gimp-plugin-registry is amazing. It almost doubles what you can do with GIMP which, given how much it can do out of the box, I would have though impossible if I hadn't seen for myself.
    Mark

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