how to add text to many photos keeping text size consistent
June 22, 2019 7:10 PM   Subscribe

I have over a hundred photos of places which I use as in slideshow mode as desktops on my Windows 10 PC. I want to add text to each photo to name the place but I can't get the text size consistent because Windows resizes the images to fit the screen. How do I solve this?

The screen is 1920 x 1080 so I cropped each photo to match, so its height = 0.5625 width (height = 1.777 width). When Windows randomly picks a photo for the desktop, it resizes the image to fit the screen.

Because the photos have different sizes and resolutions I can't figure out how to get the text size to be the same in each when displayed.

E.g.
photo1 is 2310x1230 pixels (with resolution 72 dpi)
photo2 is 4368x2457 pixels (resolution 240 dpi)
photo3 is 690x388 pixels (resolution 300 dpi)
photo4 is 2554x1436 px (res 72 dpi)

I've been adding text by editing the image (with Paint.NET but open to using any other tool) but cannot figure out what font size to use. As desktop backgrounds some photos have tiny unreadable text and others have giant letters, occasionally others are just right. Maybe thinking of it in terms of font size is the wrong approach?

How best can I add text which will appear the same size on my screen for each image after Windows has resized the image? Do I change the image dimensions before inserting text? I'd like to not lose pixels, and keep as much detail in the images as possible.
posted by anadem to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
Yes, first resample copies of all the images to 1920x1080 PIXELS then do your lettering.
Look for hints on resampling using Paint.NET on YouTube.
posted by Fins at 7:56 PM on June 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


Best answer: 2nding batch resizing then adding text. On Windows, I'd probably use Irfanview for the batch resizing.
posted by Candleman at 8:30 PM on June 22, 2019


Best answer: How best can I add text which will appear the same size on my screen for each image after Windows has resized the image?

By making sure that Windows resizes every image by exactly the same amount; most easily done by resizing them yourself in such a way that Windows won't need to scale them any further.

Do I change the image dimensions before inserting text?

Yes.

I'd like to not lose pixels, and keep as much detail in the images as possible.

The DPI numbers saved in your original JPEG images are a hint to be used when printing the associated image or combining it with others in an image editor, and they will simply be ignored when a whole photo is displayed on a whole screen. The only thing that actually matters in the latter case is the number of pixels in the original image and the number of pixels on the screen.

If you have originals that have more pixels than your screen does, you're going to lose some when they're displayed. If you have originals with fewer pixels than your screen, you're going to see some degree of blurring when they're displayed. This is just the nature of displaying photos fullscreen, and there is simply no way around it.

What you do have a choice of, though, is between (a) scaling your pictures to 1920x1080 by hand and then having Windows display them as-is, or (b) leaving them as close to original size as aspect ratios allow and then having Windows scale them for you on display. The visual quality you get from either choice is going to be pretty much the same*, but doing the scaling yourself before you add your text will make that text show in a consistent size.

As long as you don't overwrite your originals, you won't lose a thing.

If you're contemplating upgrading to a 4K screen at some point, you might want to do your hand scaling step to the native 4K pixel dimensions 3840x2160 instead of 1920x1080. Windows will do a consistent and fairly clean job of scaling that down to 1920x1080 for display on your existing screen, and you might be pleasantly surprised by how small the space penalty is for doing this; the size of a JPEG file depends mainly on the amount of detail it contains rather than its final pixel dimensions, so if you upscale a 2310x1230 original to 3840x2160 and save it with similar JPEG compression quality to the original, you should find that the scaled JPEG's file size is almost the same as the original's.

*If the resizing tool you're using has a JPEG quality slider in its Save As dialog, setting it to 90% or above should give you a result with no noticeable JPEG compression artifacts when viewed fullscreen. If you want to get all purist and avoid adding more JPEG compression artifacts entirely, saving your scaled pictures in BMP format will achieve that but disk space usage will be fairly horrendous.
posted by flabdablet at 7:05 AM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


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