graphicsmagick and photobucket

I just discovered photobucket and have been uploading pictures there. I like that I can't even find (in some desultory FAQ searching) what their bandwidth or space limits are. And I really like that I can display those images from elsewhere (can't do that with flickr, need to surf to the flickr link).

I have no idea how these guys make money, but there must be money being made somehow.

When uploading images though, I've just been pushing up 2.5MB images (because my camera is set to take pictures at a very high resolution, have 1GB, will use it all ;-). Even at that high resolution I rarely ever run out of space on the memory stick. I've run out of battery 3 times more than I've run out of memory.

But it's impolite to push up images that large. I don't even dare show them on my other me because they're just too big. It took me all of five days to get up the initiative to install graphicsmagick. I used to use imagemagick and graphicsmagick is a fork of that project. Imagemagick is still around, but I'm just testing stuff out and decided to download graphicsmagick instead.

So now it's easy to increase the jpeg compression while at the same time scaling images to a lower resolution. I haven't decided yet what resolutions to use for thumbnail size and medium size, I'll look around and figure that out tomorrow. I'll ask around too, for what people think is a good "standard" thumbnail size.

mkdir medium
cd medium
for fn in ../*.jpg
do
gm convert -scale 800x600 -quality "75%" $fn `basename $fn`
done

cd ..
mkdir thumbnails
for fn in ../*.jpg
do
gm convert -scale [xw]x[yh] -quality "75%" $fn `basename $fn`
done

and just have a script to rotate left or right.