Mission Impossible: Batch Image Resize

Well. At least I’ve finally sorted out my gap year photos. In the end I had to download the entire galleries folder and then run a *.* search, sorting the files by dimension in explorer. I then deleted all the 480×640 files which left me with my troublesome landscape files. Next step was to resize them all to a width of 540px. Easier said than done. After about 20 or so batch image resizing programmes I found the one that I wanted. It is freeware and available from http://www.faststone.org/. The important thing was that I could tell it to batch resize a folder and then it would do all the subfolders within it. Furthermore the resized images either needed to replace the existing ones or the new files needed to retain the same folder structure so that I could just FTP them back up to the webspace and hit overwrite. Eventually after much fuss and accidentally moving and deleting thousands of photos I managed to resize all my landscape photos as well as reduce the quality ever so slightly [only to 80 JPEG quality mind you] and even managed to save myself around 50 or so megs of webspace. Which was nice.

Nevertheless that wasn’t the end of the debarcle. I found that as a consequence of resizing my photos the files extension had changed from .JPG to . jpg. Not a problem in Windows, however unix based servers are case sensitive. So as I started to upload my files i found that I was just creating second copies that wouldnt be recognised by the gallery script. Oh bugger. Luckily I have on my HD a mass renaming proggy which I could just select the folder and change all the file extensions to .JPG. Nonetheless, I then found out that some of the orginal files had lower case extensions from when they’d beeen edited in the past. In the end it took a lot of FTPing and a lot of renaming to get the right files in the right places with no duplicates. So my lovelies there should now be all my Gap Year photos on the travel section whcih fit nicely on the page whilst keeping my portrait photos full size. Enjoy.

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