GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 148333
Dialog controlled batch operations
Last modified: 2018-05-24 11:09:24 UTC
There should be a dialog controlled do XX on a set of files, e.g. batch resize or the famous create thumbnails operation. It should not be necessary to use scripting, the feature should work on all platforms. The dialog should allow the selection of a set of files, individual files or a whole directory (I like the way IrfanView (www.irfanview.com) offers this feature), there should be a different output directory. Then the user should be offered to select what should be executed on that set of files, a script, an action like in photoshop or by using a dialog like in Irfanview (see attachment).
Created attachment 29843 [details] Irfanview's batch options dialog
Have you tried DBP? http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html
Most people prefer convert from ImageMagick for such tasks.
ad Comment #2: I only had a look, the doc says only for Gimp 1.2 and 1.3. And I am running Gimp on Windows. Anyway, everybody and his dog owning a digital camera, batch conversion of images should be a Gimp core functionality, not needing to get and install a plugin. ad Comment #3: If you accept that it is better to have a Gui for image editing, why wouldn't you want to use that gui to define batch operations? Not everybody knows perl, shell or lisp. I find it much easier to batch convert images with Irfanview. If only the result had the quality of Gimp's conversions ...
We are not arguing that batch conversion in GIMP doesn't make sense. But it doesn't belong into the core and there's a plug-in already that provides this functionality. Why a bug report on it then?
Hmm. The plug-in is pretty limited, and has apparently not been ported to Gimp 2.0. I agree that this functionality belongs in a plug-in rather than the core, but it would be such a useful and important plug-in that maybe it would make sense to keep this open as an enhancement request, and even raise its priority. In any case, there may actually be some core functionality needed to make this work efficiently: it would help to be able to give Gimp, on the command line, a list of file names, which it would not open but would treat as a piece of data to be passed to plug-ins when they request it.
If you pass the sequence of images on the command-line anyway you can as well use a tool that was designed for the job and do it all on the command-line.
So there are people used to working with Gimp, who know the results of different filters and jpeg quality parameters, and who rely on Gimp's quality of work. Of course they'd like to have Gimp as work engine in a batch, too, and not have to trust on any other tool, which might give different results. Usually you try out a batch operation first interactively with one image, and if you like the result, you use it for batch. It seems strange to me having this great graphics engine in Gimp and recommending another tool for batch operations.
And which command line tool do you recommend for applying that great Gimp script on the 2000 photos from your last photo trip? Yes, I know, you can start Gimp 2000 times in a loop, but having one Gimp process looping over the images seems much more efficient to me.
FYI and slightly OT: Tiny-Fu, the planned-to-be-successor of Script-Fu, has a much more sophisticated interface for file and dir access. It will be a lot easier to create batch manipulation scripts with it. And in regard to DBP, you could try to adapt it for GIMP 2.0. This doesn't require much programming skills, it's more about reading the docs.
I never suggested to start GIMP 2000 times in a loop. That would be truly sick.
Just for completeness, there should probably be a link to http://gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/
^^That tutorial doesn't address the situation for Windows users. I use Windows and would like an interface like PaintShopPro has for recording batch process macros.
*** Bug 769556 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
There is also bug 173066 which asks to include the plugin called David's Batch Processor (DBP). With a web search, I also find another, called BIMP: http://registry.gimp.org/node/26259 That's just a small note, since I don't have much insight to this issue.
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