Make resized copies of pics in folders/sub-folders and retain folder structure?

August 21, 2006 10:08 AM

I have all my travel photos (about 10gigs) in a nice easy-to-use file structure that makes sense to me. I want to make a copy of it all with relatively low-res photos (~40kb/pic) and maintain the folder hierarchy for use with a PDA. I have irfanview and photoshop if that helps. I'm looking for a batch solution to do it all at once--it is a lot of folders. (Windows XP)
posted by wogbat to computers & internet (8 comments total)

See this question.

Easiest way: make a complete copy of all your photos in another directory tree (~10 gigs) (so that you don't screw up your originals). Install Imagemagick. Use mogrify on the copy. I don't know off-hand how to do multiple directories at once in Windows, but you can certainly do one directory at a time, and with a little DOS batch file magic, I expect you can zap the whole batch at once.

Hmmm, what about forfiles? Forfiles in this recursive specification, mogrify them. Ought to work.
posted by jellicle at 10:28 AM on August 21, 2006

Irfanview does batch conversion, including preserving directory structure.

File | Batch
posted by unixrat at 11:01 AM on August 21, 2006

This can do what you want in one drag-and-drop.
posted by winston at 11:25 AM on August 21, 2006

winston - is that clean? No spy or malware? Seems too good to be true.
posted by FlamingBore at 12:24 PM on August 21, 2006

Photoshop can do it too. Make an action that resizes. Make a copy of your files. Go to File/Automate/Batch and point it to the upper most folder, and check the "include all enclosed folders" check box (and then go to lunch).
posted by doctor_negative at 12:33 PM on August 21, 2006

Irfanview does it just fine as a rename/resize.... and it's ridiculously fast at it too. I'd take a backup just in case you make it write back to the same directory or misconfigure something.
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 1:30 PM on August 21, 2006

I would use Photoshop actions too; they're very easy to set up. Another thing you can do is save the thumbnails as a different format than the originals. Make this the last step in your Photoshop action. Ideally, the originals are TIFFs and the thumbnails can be saved as JPEGs, but any format that yr PDA can see will do. This way you can't accidentally overwrite your originals.
posted by Cranialtorque at 5:05 PM on August 21, 2006

winston - is that clean? No spy or malware? Seems too good to be true.

It's clean AFAICT. You download the actual .exe -- there's no additional files or installation procedure that makes any changes to your computer. It doesn't set off any alarms on my computer.
posted by winston at 9:29 PM on August 23, 2006