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

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

wogbat — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:08:07 -0800

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)

By: jellicle

jellicle — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:28:22 -0800

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.

By: unixrat

unixrat — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:01:21 -0800

Irfanview does batch conversion, including preserving directory structure.

File | Batch

By: winston

winston — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:25:05 -0800

This can do what you want in one drag-and-drop.

By: FlamingBore

FlamingBore — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:24:50 -0800

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

By: doctor_negative

doctor_negative — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:33:27 -0800

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).

By: PWA_BadBoy

PWA_BadBoy — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:30:27 -0800

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.

By: Cranialtorque

Cranialtorque — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:05:40 -0800

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.

By: winston

winston — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:29:43 -0800

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.