Reduce pictures with a script for imagemagick

Blogging is fun, but can be quite some effort. One of the things necessary is to scale pictures so they fit into the blog, are large and sharp enough to show the details necessary, but also be as small as possible to have great page load times.

The best results I can possibly generate are with photoshop, and that also has a nice batch option. On Windows Irfanview is a great tool to automate this super easily in pretty good quality as well. My tool of choice on linux is imagemagick. While it has tons of options, below setting works great for me.

This script I start from the folder with the pictures. It takes one parameter on call - the length wanted for the longer side. So, calling it like 'image-resize.sh 800'  is the way to go.
It would check if the folder exists and if not generate it; then rename all filenames in the startfolder to small letters, then rename .jpeg to .jpg to make all jpg accessible to the imagemagic script.

#!bash
if [[ ! -d $1 ]]
      then mkdir "$1"
fi 

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
rename 's/\.jpeg/\.jpg/' *

for i in *.jpg
convert "$i" -resize "${1}^>" -quality 25% -unsharp 1.2x1.2+1+0 "$1"/s_"$i"
done

Then it reduce pictures where the larger side (height or width) is larger than 800 px to exactly 800 px. It maintains the ratio, sharpens as well and reduces the quality to 30% as well - a value I found the sweet spot between quality and image size for many of my pictures. Final step is to add a s_ to the filename and generate it into that folder. Most important insight (from a forum) was the setting for 'value^>' - setting the longer side to this value.