IrfanView and EyeBatch

Between trying to find a good way to backup the photos on my computer, editing/croping them to be displayed on the web, and researching my Mosaic project ... I have found a huge need for batch photo editing software. It is invaluable when trying to rename, resize, and backup a few thousands photos to my external hard drive.

My current favorite has got to be EyeBatch. Only problem ... its not free, and the $40 price tag seems a bit high for utility software that I don't "need". But, they do have a 30 day trial which I believe is fully functional, and after that there are other options ;) [caugh] astalavista [caugh]. It is a pretty nice little utility.

The first screen you are presented with allows you to navigate your hard drive and add photos to its working list (individually, by folder, or by folders with sub folders). Once you have the list of file you want to work with, the second screen allows you to screate a script of actions you want to take on each of the files. EyeBatch has a ton of different actions that can be done ranging from the obvious (save file as, resize, crop, etc) to some pretty interesting ones (add masks, change colors, add semi-transparent watermarks, crop borders automatically, etc). Each options usually allows for a fair amount of customization (you can rename files, select where they will be saved to, add pre/suffixes, number, modify formats, etc) which allows you to do pretty much anything.

The interface is decently intuitive for such a utility (add actions from action list to script list, double click on each to set parameters) and when you are satisfied you just hit [process] and away it goes. The program can slow a lesser machine down a bit when its chugging along through a large list of decently sized files, but thats to be expected (and process priority can be changed). Overall I have been extremely happy with it. A couple nice features were its ability to preserve EXIF data and intelligently copy JPEGs so that they wouldn't be re-encoded resulting in loss of data and/or artifacts.


Just today I stumbled across IrfanView again and am currently playing around with it. It is primarially a image/audio/movie viewer and player. It has a thumbnail view and can quickly bop around through your media. It has what looks to be a decent amount of batch edit functionality but I haven't ran it against a large image list to compare efficiency yet. The interface isn't as intuitive as EyeBatch, it appears to have been designed by the programmer, not a "designer", but is fully functional. On the plus side, IrfanView is free to begin with, supports the viewing(and for most writing) of a huge number of formates, and has some ability to design add-on plugins?


They both share one problem, however. They are only written for windows. So when I get the Mac I will need to find a substitute. Right now I am thinking about the Mosaic project and trying to figure out how much a decent sized poster print will cost to have printed, what kind of aspect rations we are talking about, and what kind of resolution I will need to A) have the print come out clean and crisp and B) how big and at what resolution can I print the "photo-pixels" so that they are small enough to have the overall image be recognizable, but still recognizable themselves. I think I am going to have print off some samples to try and get a feel for how big an image can be and still be recognizable and at what PPI I can get them to print it and have it matter. According to one site's table and my own rough calculations the end photograph may need to be a 20+ megapixel image to print as big as I want it with decent PPI.

hrmmm. thats pretty big ;)