Batchy badness
Being, as I am, on the verge of starting a photolog (one of extreme dorkery, might I add); I thought I’d compare the various image–resizing tools at my disposal. Clearly I don’t plan to upload the full 2 megapixel images to my server, so resizing is a must… and not just the thumbnail creation offered by Movable Type through the Image::Magick module. iPhoto has a fairly basic export functionality, nothing exciting, and of course Photoshop Elements (excuse me for not shelling out for full–version Photoshop) has its own batch processing feature, but a shootout between the two has proven most interesting.
First off: Any entries to my photolog would likely be 640 by 480 pixels, so I exported part of my iPhoto library to that size, and batch processed the same images using Photoshop. iPhoto offers no options as to quality, so I had to go with the default, but Photoshop presents you with a slew of controls; I went with High Quality JPG. Not all that surprisingly, Photoshop won on the file size, but the output was of visibly lower quality. Interesting. I pushed on to thumbnails.
This is where the shit really starts flying. A low quality 100 by 75 pixel thumbnail pushed out of Photoshop is a full 72 kilobytes… an astounding figure. iPhoto pushes out noticeably higher–quality thumbnails at one fifth the file size, which pleases me greatly, but is still way too much for a thumbnail. Elsewhere, Image::Magick happily produces a (fairly low quality) thumbnail at 3Kb, and running a photo through Photoshop’s ‘Save for Web’ panel yields a (fairly high quality) thumbnail weighing just 4Kb. I’m stunned. Must I convert these damned photos all by hand? What hath God wraught?
My penchant for laziness leans me towards iPhoto exports: simple, safe, reasonable. My maddening neuroses demand smaller file sizes. It’s a battle I just can’t win… so I’m thinking I might have to kill… everyone.