With a couple of small children, and a nice digital SLR, a lot of photos get taken in this house.

Of course people want the photos emailed to them, and it’s just impolite to email a collection of 3mb images (did you get that everyone ? impolite!). It’s pretty tedious going through and manually resizing stacks of files, so a few years ago I looked at some alternatives.

The answer is ImageMagick, the open source image manipulation suite that will do just about everything, run on any platform and integrate with any language.

There are a few elegant ways I could have used the ImageMagick library to automate some photo resizing but a two line batch file does an ok job. Unfortunely, every time I’ve reinstalled Windows on Sam’s computer, I forgot to back up and migrate this particular script. To having to look up all the command line parameters again tonight, and to avoid it next time, here is the script.

mkdir emailable
for %%f in (*.jpg) DO "c:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.4.3-Q16\convert.exe" "%%f" -resize 1000 -quality 50 "emailable\small_%%f"

Not pretty, but functional. Save this in a file called “emailable.bat” somewhere in your path.

I use the Command Shell here PowerToy to open up a command window in a new directory of photos (the Canon software exports photos to a folder for each day), type “emailable” and it creates a subdirectory and copies a lower quality, smaller version of every photo there.

Hopefully this workflow will appeal to someone else out there, but for me, it’s now safely online and in Google’s cache.