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I am looking for free, preferably open, alternatives to ACDSee for batch editing work. While I can do much of the work well on ACDSee, it's not entirely satisfactory despite having to pay for it. I need at least the following batch editing functions:
- Resize using either height or width while maintaining aspect ratio
- Auto contrast
- text overlays
- and occasionally, cropping
- oh, I make extensive use of renaming features as well
Couple of issues with ACDSee are: I always need to highlight the Exposure section or auto contrast will not be done despite it being saved in the preset; and I can't define, move around the cropping box, forcing me to manually crop tons of images.
I'm not an advanced, or "power photo-editor". I only require the basic stuff I described to be automated. My personal feature wish list (I'm pretty sure something so niche doesn't exist) would be text overlay based on the image names (images are named as image-1_1, image-1_2 or image-2_c1_1, image-2_c1_2, and text overlay would Image-1 and Image-2 C1 and Image-2 C2).
I tried digiKam, but damn that thing is huge. It runs very slowly on my Pentium 4 and 1.5 GB RAM. On top of being a program with over 1 GB of files, the KDE library it uses is always slow regardless of it running on either Windows or Linux.
By the way, all of that documentation could look overwhelming. Here's a quick introduction to the basics features: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf/?ca=dnt-428
Here's a guide tailored to Windows users. http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/windows/
Well, I would love to use Linux, but tagged the question as Windows as that's where I need to edit all those images. – Oxwivi – 2012-06-25T10:22:33.323
Yep, I've created batch jobs in the past to automate the production of web-ready images: resizing, reducing the size, adding watermark text. However, see my note below about renaming using the embedded EXIF data. – Julian Knight – 2012-06-25T10:27:05.923
@Oxwivi it does work in Windows, too. That's why I suggested it. If you read my comment above, there's also some documentation specifically tailored towards windows users. In fact, when I wrote "it works on Linux and Mac too", that meant implicitly "other than Windows". – Dakatine – 2012-06-25T11:19:37.240