Down-sizing photos for optimal viewing on QVGA

[Guest petec500]

I have an 8MP digital camera and would like to save some of my favourite photos onto my HTC Touch for viewing as a slide-show. Thing is, if i store the photos as they come out of the camera (at 2MB+ per photo), i'm soon going to find my SD card full up. So, i'm guessing the ideal way is to shrink down the photos to match the resolution of the screen (320 x 240?), with the corresponding file size reduction. I can do this with PhotoShop, but it takes ages, so i was wondering if there's an easier way, like a bit of freeware that does it with a single click?

Any ideas?

[Guest mandt]

Hmm, good idea that, so I did a little Googling, and came up with this: Ashongsoft Image converter One

Tested it for a few minutes and I'm pretty impressed so far, Cheers :(

[Guest petec500]

Hmm, good idea that, so I did a little Googling, and came up with this: Ashongsoft Image converter One

Tested it for a few minutes and I'm pretty impressed so far, Cheers :(

Looks promising - i'll try it at home this evening.

Thanks for this!

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Resco Photo Viewer can do this, and package your pics into a nice album format too.

P

[Guest Menneisyys]

You might also want to read my Image Viewer Bible ( http://www.winmobiletech.com/PICVIEWERS ); in there, I've elaborated on how this can be done.

In general, I recommend using ImageMagick the most - if you use the batch file I've provided in the Bible, it only takes ONE click to convert all your images.

The related section:

""Any kind of batch processing?" was the next usability test. It's often advantageous to be able to do exactly the same transformation to a bunch of images at once, without repeating it manually for each file. An example of this is taking a lot of pictures, putting the memory card in the PDA, and resizing them / decreasing their quality for E-mail / FTP / HTTP transfer. This is exactly how desktop-based image converters (e.g., IfranView, http://www.irfanview.com/ or ImageMagick, http://imagemagick.org/) work. Fortunately, some of the programs allows for this, to a certain degree. Unfortunately, neither the two best consumer-grade program, Spb / Resco, support writing back to file system. Actually, Resco has an almost non-existing batch mode (see remarks in the table). Prosumer apps like Pocket Artist and, particularly, Pocket Phojo do support batch (the latter supports them with severel different source/target types), however.

As an example of the usability of batch processing, assume you're abroad only with your PDA and without access to any decent desktop computers and you want to process your images there. However, usually, most shops that develop print images have lower prices on traditional 2:3 photopapers. How would you give them your originally 3:4 images in a 2:3 format to make use of this possibility?

A common trick is converting a 3:4 size-ratio image to a 2:3 one is cropping only the middle of the image and discarding the uppermost and the lowermost part of it. Assuming 5 Mpixel (2592*1952) image, you can discard the upper and lower part of all your images in the current (and all sub-) directory with the following ImageMagick call:

FOR /R %%X IN (*.jpg) DO "C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.2.1-Q8\convert.exe" -crop 2592x1728+0+112 "%%X" "%%X"

(for a 2Mpixel 1632*1088 image, the parameters of convert -crop would be -1632x1088+0+68)

This command will convert your file into 2:3 by just keeping the middle area.

How would you do this on your Pocket PC? This is where crop-capable batch mode that writes back to the file system comes into the picture. Using that, you could convert all your images on your PDA without hunting for a desktop / notebook computer.

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