I’ve been helping my mom out a bit lately with the website for her artwork, Voice of Flying Ink. It includes a few galleries of her works in a simple table of thumbnails layout. It’s reasonable that occasionally she’ll want to put up some new pictures, which involes scaling and padding the original to two different sizes, zoomed and thumbnail. I bet Photoshop has some kind of batch processing wizard to make that easy, but I don’t have Photoshop, so I looked around for another way.
I first thought to try Automator. I was able to scale and pad a photo, but it’s critical I be able to choose the padding color, and I wasn’t able to do that with the Automator actions I had available. Apple’s Pad Image action doesn’t let you set the color, and apparently no one else has thought of this yet, or at least, if they have, Google can’t find it.
I next turned to Quartz Composer, and found it pretty easy to write an action to scale pad a whole directory of images with almost no code – I probably could have actually used no code, but I’m a programmer and sometimes it’s easier for me to just script something up than to figure out how to do it with a GUI. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to save images from Quartz Composer to a file.
Next, I tried ImageMagick, which involves the command line, but it was relatively easy but not very cool. It works and that’s what I’ll do for now, but –
I’d like to solve this by wrapping my QC composition in an Automator action. The Automator action would take a file as input and as output, and the QC composition could do whatever you want it to do. I might even be able to allow the user to set the composition; then you could do ANY kind of image processing possible with QC, as part of an Automator workflow. Fun!
