Nautilus Image Converter, a quintessential tool for everyone

 

"A picture says a thousand words", or so I've heard anyway. In this era of digital content catering, we're pretty confident that while text does have its uses, images are important nonetheless. And all the more so, for people who blog, work with images, work in photojournalism or are photography enthusiasts.

For working with images, Ubuntu and other Linux distros provide an array of versatile tools, ranging from simple tools such as Kolorpaint to complex, massive developments such as our beloved GIMP. But there's this thing called UNIX Philosophy, which essentially dictates that it's better to build bundles of simpler programs, that do specific tasks (and do them well) and then make them work together, rather than building a bloat of a software that attempts to become a jack-of-all-trade, and eventually spirals into a no-gooder for all of us.

And nautilus-image-converter, a neatly developed extension for our old friend Nautilus that just works, is just that.

What's the deal? 

Well, the purpose of nautilus-image-converter is rather simple. It's an extension to Nautilus, that adds itself to the right-click menu, and gives you the ability to quickly resize/rotate any number of images. The resizing part is done with the help of imagemagick, which is automatically installed as a dependency when you download nautilus-image-converter.

Do I need it? 

Image resizing options

Well, I believe you do, especially if you upload images on the web, like I do. Uploading a 16 MP image, taken from the camera, does more harm than good, usually. It consumes more bandwidth, makes your site/blog slow, and doesn't render well on slow connections. That's why, it is always wise to actually minimize the image by resizing it, before posting it online.

That way, the loading time is saved, and people with slow connections can enjoy your pictures as well. Obviously, quality is lowered (since there is less resolution now), but that doesn't matter in most most cases, since you've got the original image on your disk anyway. 

Additionally, naming the new image is automatic. You can either replace the original image (not recommended), or it will create a duplicate image, as <imagename>.resized.<extension>.

Installation 

Installing it is very easy, just enter terminal and run this command:

$ sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter 

Obviously, exclude the $ sign (it's just for the prompt). Once the extension is installed, you need to restart nautilus to see the rotate and resize options. For this, fire up your shell again, and type:

$ pkill nautilus

Don't worry, nautilus isn't going to sink, or kick the bucket, it just restarts. Open your home folder now, and find an image. Right click on it, and you'll see the rotate and resize options.

Resizing especially, is the gist of this extension. You can specify a size manually (width x height), select a preconfigured resolution, or just scale the image to, say, 50% of its original resolution (i.e making a 16 MP image into a 4 MP image essentially).

Conclusion 

Well, while there's nothing else to it, this is the simple beauty of this extension. Whenever I install a Linux distro, nautilus-image-converter is among the first programs I install. Without it, life would be a lot harder, indeed.