:: aerobrain ::

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Batch Photo Editing

Nowadays, we can see people carrying digital camera everywhere. Almost each of us carry camera with us either a dedicated digital camera or handphone with camera. With the rapid progress of CCD/CMOS sensor technology which enabled us to capture digital images, the amount of pixels which also directly proportional to the picture size also rapidly increase.

From <1 megapixels back in year 2000, we can get the same price with better features camera of 8-10 megapixels in year 2009. More pixels means larger size. Some very busy people do not really have the leisure time to upload the original 10-megapixel photo which size around 4-5 megabytes (MB). If you notice, if you upload to any photo sharing sites, the photo will be resize to a smaller resolution. Taking for example flickr, the maximum resolution (for free account) is 1024 at the long side. Thus, it is good to resize first the photo before uploading to avoid long uploading time. To help us do the resize in batch, I would like to share in this article a software that can help us to resize, edit and put watermark on the photos. Not only 1 photos, but a batch of photos.

I started to Google around to look for freeware that can do batch convert of photos. The reason is that I want to upload the photos to my website and I want all photos to be watermarked. Of course, for those familiar with Adobe Photoshop, this super duper software is able to do batch processing and some other complicated processes which most of us would not really need.

Thus, I would like to recommend FastStone Image Viewer which is developed by FastStone Soft. It is a freeware for home users. For business use, you need to purchase additional license.

FastStone Soft developed the following software (only freeware listed here as of February 11, 2009):

FastStone Image Viewer - already bundled with Photo Resizer
FastStone Photo Resizer

Screenshot from FastStone Image Viewer:

Features:

Left: Directory Tree
Right: Photo Thumbnails
Below Left: Preview - I normally turn this off. Because you can easily preview by double clicking or middle button.
On the top toolbar: Comparison - compare up to 4 photos for details as shown below.

Now, let see the batch processing. As I mentioned earlier, FastStone Image Viewer is already bundled with Photo Resizer. Thus, below are the steps to open Photo Resizer:
Select Folder –> Right Click –> Select “Batch Convert” or shortcut “F3”

You will get the below window:

Some of the features you can clearly see in this window are:

Batch Rename - rename all of the selected photos with a specific pattern
Output format - set the output format and also the quality of the output
Output folder - the folder where the files will be stored

Now we go to Advanced Options:

Note that, some tabs have Green dots and some do not have. Those with Green dots we already customized by me. I would like to resize this photo, place text from EXIF data and finally place the watermark.

Let us take a little more detail on “Text” tab:

Here you can please not only your customized text, but also the data from EXIF. For example, ($H1) is for Date/Time stamp, ($O) for ISO speed, etc.

Below is the screenshot of the process window (17 pcs of 10-megapixel photos in 38 seconds!):

Summary for the features on each tabs:

Resize - Resize the photo
Rotate - Rotate/Flip the photo
Crop - Crop the photo
Canvas - Enlarge/Smaller the photo area
Color Depth - Change the color depth of the photo
Adjustments - Apply the details: brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, gamma, lightness, sharpen/blur, colors (red, green, blue), greyscale, negatice, sepia
DPI - Change the photo resolution (useful for photo printing)
Text - Place text/EXIF data on photo
Watermark - Place watermark on photo
Border - Put a border on photo