Capturing a moment has never been as easy as it is today. Chances are that your Android powered smartphone is capable of shooting 8mega pixel images. Then there are professional cameras which produce high resolution images and each image can take up to 20 MB is amazing.

Of course you will keep an original version of these image to play on your HD TV or for archival purposes. As it happened to me yesterday, have you ever come across a situation where you had to batch-process hundreds of images?

I came across the same situation when after Halloween I ended up with 200 snaps on my memory card and I had to share them with friends through a slow Internet connection.

What I needed was to batch-edit or batch-process these images to reduce resolution by 50% so the file size was manageable to be uploaded on Facebook or my site so that friends can see these images.

I am a heavy GIMP user, but doing the same with GIMP – reducing resolution of 200 was a cumbersome job which was going to take hours. Software like GIMP is great when you want to edit an image with an artist like precision, but to resize 200 images would mean manually editing each image and couple of man-hours.

I needed something else. That's where Phatch comes into action. Phatch (PHoto & bATCH) is a raster graphics editor used to batch process digital graphics and photographs.

Phatch handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. It can batch resize, rotate, apply perspective, shadows, rounded corners, ... and more in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually.

Installation
It is extremely easy to install Phatch under Ubuntu. Just go to Application>Ubuntu Software Center and search for Phatch. Click on Install and it will take few minutes to install Phatch. Once installed you can find Phatch under Applications>Graphics>Phatch photo batch processor.

Phatch comes with dozens of 'actions' which you can use. When you run Phatch, you can see how user-friendly it is. It asks you to click + to add an action. I selected  "save" action to create a low-resolution batch of my images.

Second option is 'A', here you can choose the format or extension of the image. I my case, I had a set of .png images and I wanted to convert them to .jpg so I selected jpg in As.

Now comes the option 'In'. It allows you to select the folder where the newly created images will be saved. I had created a new folder for the batch-processed image so that there will be no confusion with file names when I would later upload these to my site or Facebook.

I would recommend creating a new folder for new set of images. You can use the browse icon and browse the desired folder. Now comes the 'dpi' option, you can change it depending on the use. You can see the meta-data of images to find dpi etc by using Phatch Image Inspector which is available under Applications>Graphics.

The most important option here is 'JPEG quality', which will do what I wanted, reduce the  image resolution or file size. Under JPEG quality I reduced it to 50%. It did not touch any other options.

Once this is done, click on the 'gears' icon on top which will open a browsing window. Browse the folder where the original images are stored and click open. You can now see the name and path of the folder in the bar. A click on the Batch button will show you the images which are going to be batch processed. Press 'Continue' and Phatch will start processing your images.

The software is extremely powerful and resource efficient. It tool some 5 seconds to batch process 200 images which I took last night at Halloween 'Trunk or Treat.

You can play with other actions and enjoy the power of Phatch and Free and Open Source software.  Share with use your experience with Phatch.

Published under the series Arnie's Guide To Ubuntu. If you know similar tools which can be useful for Ubuntu users, send us tip and tricks at editor@muktware.com.

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