I am a big fan of automating things and Ubuntu (or Linux) gives me more and more opportunities for the same. It makes me content automating mundane tasks and am willing to spend time to get it done.
Recently, I was looking on how to watermark the images on this blog and was exploring not only how to watermark, but also how to automate the process given a bunch of images. Started exploring GIMP Script-Fu which is similar to Excel Macros to automate tasks. But, given a simple task like watermarking, it was more of a big bite to learn a new language Script-Fu.
After a bit of googling, finally found Phatch. Initially, was not sure what Phatch means, but found it is a sort of acronym for PHoto & bATCH. Actions can be created using Phatch UI and can be chained together as shown below. The work-flow definition will be automatically generated as shown in this file.
The workflow gets all the images in a particular folder, applies the specified watermark to each of the image and finally stores the images in a `wm` folder. Note the below image is with a watermark at the bottom right.
Phatch can also be run from the command line as below specifying the phatch file which contains the work-flow definition and the location of the images which needs to be watermarked.
One of the reason many say for not moving to the Linux OS is the availability of the softwares, but this is far from true. Ubuntu repository has a lot of softwares and only some of them are installed by default during the installation process. Synaptic Package Manager which is a front-end to apt-get can be used to manage the softwares in Ubuntu. So, given a task to accomplish, it's a matter of picking the appropriate software.
More and more games are also getting into the Linux platform, so it's not a bad bet after all :)
Recently, I was looking on how to watermark the images on this blog and was exploring not only how to watermark, but also how to automate the process given a bunch of images. Started exploring GIMP Script-Fu which is similar to Excel Macros to automate tasks. But, given a simple task like watermarking, it was more of a big bite to learn a new language Script-Fu.
After a bit of googling, finally found Phatch. Initially, was not sure what Phatch means, but found it is a sort of acronym for PHoto & bATCH. Actions can be created using Phatch UI and can be chained together as shown below. The work-flow definition will be automatically generated as shown in this file.
The workflow gets all the images in a particular folder, applies the specified watermark to each of the image and finally stores the images in a `wm` folder. Note the below image is with a watermark at the bottom right.
phatch wm.phatch /home/praveensripati/images/There are a lot of obscure softwares like these for Linux which are far more better than the windows counterpart. It's all a matter finding them. Would be blogging about more productivity softwares/tools like these in the future blogs.
One of the reason many say for not moving to the Linux OS is the availability of the softwares, but this is far from true. Ubuntu repository has a lot of softwares and only some of them are installed by default during the installation process. Synaptic Package Manager which is a front-end to apt-get can be used to manage the softwares in Ubuntu. So, given a task to accomplish, it's a matter of picking the appropriate software.
More and more games are also getting into the Linux platform, so it's not a bad bet after all :)
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