The CLI is your friend - even with images

It’s good to know that there are people who have seen the light and realize that there still is nothing quite like the good old Command Line Interface for dealing with… well, almost everything that can be done in a repetitive manner. And that they know that this applies to everything including image manipulation (video also, but this is not my main point right now).

Now ImageMagick is something which is vital for me in managing my digital pictures collection and in preparing on-line albums and trip logs. It is simple to use and oh so powerful but it is all done in the CLI.

Well, it does have a GUI (TK maybe? I forget) but I’ve never felt the need for it because it is just far more simple and efficient to just write something like: “for a in *.jpg ; do convert -geometry 800x800 $a $a ; done” and get all my pictures in x800 or 800x.

Yes, it’s that simple and this article gives a very good idea of what can be done. Of course, there is a whole lot more you can do with ImageMagick than the article says, but it gives a pretty good first approach to it.

You gotta love it!