easymagick.py

A simpler python script to help with batch operations on images using the ImageMagick library. The library has a built in command mogrify, but its use is discouraged. This command was designed to edit image in-place and hence runs the risk of accidental loss of your source images if the command is not executed with the right flags.

They recommend using an sh shell loop to call the convert command. However, I wanted to make it OS independent since I use Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I also wanted to have no additional dependencies other than the ImageMagick binaries and the standard Python library.

Usage

The command requires a recipe name and the folder to apply the recipe to

usage: easymagick.py [-h] recipe folder

Batch processor for photographs.

positional arguments:
  recipe      Batch processing recepies to use
  folder      Full path to folder to apply to

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Example

To resize images in a folder e.g. M:\Pictures\Vacation\ for on-screen viewing and place them in a sub folder called "screen" e.g. M:\Pictures\Vacation\screen\, execute the following command.

python easymagick.py screen M:\Pictures\Vacation\

Recipes

Recipes are simple named templates to define the most typical batch processing actions that you need to do. The recipes are stores in the RECIPES variable in the easymagick.py script.

Recipe: screen

My initial motivation for writing this script was to be able to reduce the size of my Digital SLR images from 24 Mega pixels to 5 Mega pixels i.e. adequate enough to view on a high resolution retina display without loss of quality. I wanted to store these re-sized images in sub-folder of each of my main picture folders.

Future Enhancements

Ability to apply a batch operation to a whole folder hierarchy recursively.
Add more recipes.
Add ability to specify a batch operation manually from command line.