Occasionally, I like to share HD photos but they always end up tens of megabytes in size and large files can be a pain send to family and friends. To circumvent this, I make sure to do some image compression before ever sending the images. It’s also very helpful when posting images to a website as large files means longer load times for users (and users don’t like that). So when I wanted to add many photos to a blog post but didn’t want to resize and compress each file manually, I had to figure something else out. A quick search led me to this post that reminded me of the power of Imagick. I’ve used it in the past to generate thumbnails based on PDFs so I knew it had a command line interface but this trick takes it to a whole new level. You’ll need to install imagick (available from most package managers) but once done, the command looks like:
mkdir compressed;for photos in *.jpg;do convert -verbose "$photos" -quality 85% -resize 1920x1080 ./compressed/"$photos"; done
Running this command from the directory your images are located in will 1.) create a new sub-directory to add your compressed files to, 2.) run a for loop through all jpegs in the current director, 3.) create a new image file with the same name in the sub-directory with the dimensions of 1920×1080 pixels and compress it by 15%. This one command saved me so much time, I had time to write another post about it.
