post 29

By anders pearson 14 Jul 2000

why do i love linux today?

with the simple magic incantation:

mogrify -geometry 600×600 -format jpg -rotate ’90<’ -contrast *.tif

i converted a directory full of 30 enormous tif files (16 megs each) to jpgs, resized them, rotated them 90 degrees and upped the contrast by a notch. just that one command. and it executed in under 2 minutes. for comparison, i tried to do the equivalent to just one of them in photoshop on windows 2000 running on exactly the same hardware. it took nearly a minute just to load the single image, let alone do the conversions, and the whole operation required about 15 mouseclicks.

the mogrify command is part of the imagemagick library which comes installed on most modern linux distributions for free. photoshop costs many hundreds of dollars. hmmm….