in reply to Batch image editing

This may not necessarily be the angle you're looking for, but I've written a few batch-imaging tools using Perl and the NetPBM toolkit. Essentially NetPBM is a set of command-line utilities that do one thing and one thing only at a time on your image. Essentially you a)convert your image from .gif/.jpeg/.png to a common internal format (.pbm), then b)perform an operation such as recolouring, rotating, then c)convert the common internal format (.pbm) back into a .gif/.jpeg/.png. Oh, and there's also a Win32 port of the NetPBM toolkit.

Another approach I took was to code using C and statically linking with the GD ToolKit. No doubt another approach is using the Perl GD library.

Just food for thought.

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Re^2: Batch image editing
by radiantmatrix (Parson) on Jul 08, 2005 at 13:12 UTC
    The problem with converting to a common format and back again is that for lossy compression schemes (i.e. JPEG), you will lose image quality each time you do this. It's very much like the old "generation problem" with analouge audio recordings: the more copies you make, the more loss you have, and the poorer the quality.

    Your first run or two is fine, but after a few runs, you will likely notice some image degradation.

    Larry Wall is Yoda: there is no try{}
    The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
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      That is true, except that it has nothing to do with converting to a common format. If you have a jpg, and open it in gimp, make some changes, and then save it again, your image quality will degrade. The only solution is to always store your images in a lossless format, and only consider jpgs to be the "end result." Much like a programmer would never delete the source code after compiling, don't delete the original RAW, or TIFF, or whatever after creating a jpg.
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