Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Irfanview, Photoshop and other tools

I just can't go past Photoshop for its amazing flexibility. I use it for nearly all my photo and graphic editing (not that I'm very good mind you.) For example the graphics on this site and the photo of the sun peeking through the clouds were all edited in Photoshop 5.

However for bulk file conversion and renames I use Irfanview.
The batch processing / conversion function is amazing. I use the advanced options to resize all the photos in a directory and create new files with the same name and a suffix to indicate their new size.
That way I can bulk process a whole raft of photos ready for upload to an online image gallery.
It is so easy to use that today I talked an international client through it on the phone in about 5 minutes flat. Within a second 5 minutes she had used an ftp program for the first time (Cute FTP PRO) and uploaded files to a Drupal website where they were converted into an image gallery using imagemagick which resides on my server.

Go and download Irfanview - its freeware and give it a try.