Batch process photos for emailing

[Muse]

So I go to the San Diego Zoo ( ! ) with relatives, me with my dinky Samsung V3 Digicam, my cousin's husband has a D40 with 18-200mm lens that he said cost him more than the camera. Guess who's photos come out better. Yes, I'm shopping for my 1st DSLR.

He sends everybody ~10 emails, each with around 10 MB of ~300kb photos. Nice. I tell him I'll send mine when I figure out how to batch compress the 70 or so ~1.2MB JPGs I have. He says iPhoto would do it, but I don't have a Mac. What can I use to batch process a folder of JPGs in preparation for emailing?

 

[xchangx]

Lightroom will be your best friend. Otherwise you can find freeware/shareware programs out there that will do it.

 

[ElFenix]

iirc picasa can do that, though it's been a while since i used it so i'm not sure

 

[timswim78]

iirc picasa can do that, though it's been a while since i used it so i'm not sure

I second Picasa. It is free, and it is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

It also allows you to do free web albums, which you may want to consider. No one wants a 10MB email of photos, no matter how nice they are.

 

[Muse]

Lightroom will be your best friend. Otherwise you can find freeware/shareware programs out there that will do it.

Any suggestions for freeware? I'm not ready to get Lightroom just yet. Probably when I get that DSLR. Thanks!

Edit: Oh, I hadn't seen those other posts. Yes, I have Picasa already, although I haven't been using it. Will check it out. Thanks, all!

 

[Muse]

I second Picasa. It is free, and it is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

It also allows you to do free web albums, which you may want to consider. No one wants a 10MB email of photos, no matter how nice they are.

Well, that's what this guy did, so I will probably go that route this once. It is more of a hassle for me to cobble it all together and send it than for the other folks to download in their email. My upload is way way slower than my download, and I suppose that's true of just about everybody. It's probably easy enough, it will just take maybe 1/2 hour to upload 20MB. Well, maybe not that long.

 

[Muse]

Well I just installed Picasa 3 and am finding it as foreign as Greek. I have no clue how to get anything done with it, none whatsoever. It appears to be anything but intuitive. Looks like it can do a whole bunch of stuff but I have no idea how to get a handle on any of that functionality. I just went into something like setting up email and it had me pick my email program, prominently displayed for me to pick by conveniently clicking a button, and it said it couldn't set it up and told me to set up Outlook as my default email program. No way in hell I'm going to do that. I've been using Forte Agent 1.932 for over a decade.

All I want to do right now is batch process 76 ~1.2MB JPGs down to ~300kb. I can't even see the folder in Picasa although I manually added it a few times. Very counter intuitive program.

 

[Muse]

I gave up on Picasa and edited each of the 76 JPGs with the software that came with my digicam. Damned editing program asks me to register about every 8-10 shots I edit, and I have to cancel every time. It won't let me register! I could swear I did at one time, but now it won't let me. I should probably use my Photoshop Essentials, which I haven't installed yet. I figure I could probably use that for everything I am doing now, and much better, including batch processing (???). I'm uploading my two emails right now, which have ~8MB attached JPGs each. I culled some shots out that weren't so hot, cropped almost all of them. I know that cropping and saving cuts the size to around 300kb.

 

[shortylickens]

I still say Picasa is the best of the free programs.
As for me, I like ACDSee. The basic version has more tools than a normal user could ever want. The advanced version leaves a lot to be desired for most power users.
http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/e...=S6Uy9AoBAiMAAFsflvMAAAAN&rests=1269117684523
If you can get it cheaper at Amazon or something I would recommend that. I only paid 30 bucks for the basic photo manager back in the day.
Am getting sick of all these companies rereleasing the same shit year after year for more money. But if you got an older version I'm sure you would not be unhappy with it.

The help that comes with ACDSee is pretty damn good. Tells you how to use just about everything.

EDIT: I dunno about Picasa being counterintuitive, but I'm a nerd so maybe I didnt notice it. You can easily select multiple images by dragging or holding shift. If you wanna batch process them go to the menu bar and hit Picture, then Batch.
However, there is no batch resizing there. BUT, if you simply upload them to a photo album you choose to resize them right there on the spot. Or not resize them and just use the massive online photo storage at google. If you dont have a gmail account I highly recommend one. Picasa is a hundred times more useful with it. From now on you dont need to resize images to make them emailable. In fact, you never need to email them again. Just send your family the link to the album and they can look at the photos anytime they want. If they feel like downloading they can do that too. Normally I dont like any sort of online or cloud computing and I certainly dont care for virtual socializing, but the picasa web album thing is a lot easier than most other pic hosting sites. You can upload from either the website itself or just upload in the Picasa file browser. At that time you can select resizing options, if any.
I'm pretty anti-online and I use it, so maybe you should think about it.
http://picasaweb.google.com/shortylickens

Obviously, you dont have to put up pics of chicks. Thats a personal choice.

 

[tdawg]

For quick jpeg editing and easy sharing among family and friends. Picasa is your friend. The program will import your images, as well as catalog your images already in your My Pictures folder, or whatever folder structure you're going to use. It also makes it ridiculously easy to upload any number of images or an entire folder to your google picasa account and you can make these albums private or public and keep them in sync with the folder on your pc. Sharing a link, or 10 links, to your album(s) is much more user friendly than sending 1 or more emails loaded down with multiple images that have to be downloaded to view.

 

[AkumaX]

I gave up on Picasa and edited each of the 76 JPGs with the software that came with my digicam. Damned editing program asks me to register about every 8-10 shots I edit, and I have to cancel every time. It won't let me register! I could swear I did at one time, but now it won't let me. I should probably use my Photoshop Essentials, which I haven't installed yet. I figure I could probably use that for everything I am doing now, and much better, including batch processing (???). I'm uploading my two emails right now, which have ~8MB attached JPGs each. I culled some shots out that weren't so hot, cropped almost all of them. I know that cropping and saving cuts the size to around 300kb.

Sorry you feel this way. Picasa is initially intrusive, but after getting rid of 'everything' and starting fresh, it works great as a basic editing program

After you install, and get to the main windows, go to Tools->Folder Manager, and unclick everything that you don't want it to detect (initially, it force-detects My Pictures, My Documents, and Desktop)

Optionally, I would go to Tools -> Options, and take out Face Detection

After, use the same Folder Manager and choose that ONE folder of everything you want to batch convert, and have it scan 1x, instead of auto-scan.

Additionally, if you add pictures to it, you should be able to see the Folder on the Left Side of the Main Window, and Refresh to add any new photos.

Then select all your photos, or select the folder you want batch converted, go to File -> Export Picture to Folder, and change the IQ/Resolution (can't pick a size per-se, but resizing everything to max 1600px would be around 200-400kb)

 

[Muse]

Sorry you feel this way. Picasa is initially intrusive, but after getting rid of 'everything' and starting fresh, it works great as a basic editing program

After you install, and get to the main windows, go to Tools->Folder Manager, and unclick everything that you don't want it to detect (initially, it force-detects My Pictures, My Documents, and Desktop)

Optionally, I would go to Tools -> Options, and take out Face Detection

After, use the same Folder Manager and choose that ONE folder of everything you want to batch convert, and have it scan 1x, instead of auto-scan.

Additionally, if you add pictures to it, you should be able to see the Folder on the Left Side of the Main Window, and Refresh to add any new photos.

Then select all your photos, or select the folder you want batch converted, go to File -> Export Picture to Folder, and change the IQ/Resolution (can't pick a size per-se, but resizing everything to max 1600px would be around 200-400kb)

Thanks! I had no idea how to deal with Picasa. I'd installed it once before letting it do its thing and it detected (it seemed, as yesterday) every graphic image on my computer. I'll try the things you suggest!

 

[bobdole369]

The photographer makes the pictures..... The camera is only a tool.

Irfanview can batch process but its pretty hard to use.

 

[Muse]

Thanks, shortylickens, tdawg and AkumaX for your explanations of how to use Picasa, Google/Picasa integration and file sharing, syncing with my file structures, how to batch process in Picasa, alternative programs, etc.

I don't use My Pictures, personally, and really just because I like to have all my data on a different HD than my OS. Makes backup easier. I do have some stuff in My Pictures, really because programs default to it and I haven't bothered to configure them (when possible) to use my own file structure.

 

[abaez]

For Picasa and emailing - why not just upload the photos to your web album (you get 1GB free I think?) When uploading it gives you the choice of low, medium or high quality photos and processes them automatically.

That way instead of sending an email with 10 300KB pictures, you just send them a link to the photo album instead and they can do what they want, include add comments and see info about the photo. I like to do this instead of processing the original file - that way I don't have the original file and a copy of it resized/processed.

 

[HN]

if the only thing you want to do is select picture -> resize, then just install the image resizer powertoy - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx

just select your pics, right click, resize (make sure you don't opt to overwrite your originals). that's it.

 

[biostud]

I use Xnview, you can customize a batch and save the settings for next time.

 

[AkumaX]

if the only thing you want to do is select picture -> resize, then just install the image resizer powertoy - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspx

just select your pics, right click, resize (make sure you don't opt to overwrite your originals). that's it.

i've always used this!

here's the equivalent vista/win 7 version (both x86 and x64 supported):
http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/

 

[Shimmishim]

If you're batch resizing for web/email, irfanview is probably the best and easiest program to use.

 

[KeithP]

I gave up on Picasa and edited each of the 76 JPGs with the software that came with my digicam. Damned editing program asks me to register about every 8-10 shots I edit, and I have to cancel every time. It won't let me register! I could swear I did at one time, but now it won't let me. I should probably use my Photoshop Essentials, which I haven't installed yet. I figure I could probably use that for everything I am doing now, and much better, including batch processing (???). I'm uploading my two emails right now, which have ~8MB attached JPGs each. I culled some shots out that weren't so hot, cropped almost all of them. I know that cropping and saving cuts the size to around 300kb.

At the main window of Picasa, at the bottom, there is a folder icon labeled export. Select the images in question in the main window, click on that button. This will present you with a window where you set with the width of the images in pixels. There are several other options at well.

You may want to try one image first to play around with the options until you find settings that will get the files sizes you want. Then, apply those settings to all the images as whole.

-KeithP

 

[jdwright]

PixResizer is a freeware program that takes folders of photos and simply changes the size and places them in another folder. The interface is as simple as it gets. I've resized thousands of pics in a hurry with it. Zero editing tools - just size change.

My 2 cents.

http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm