Right click to scale images

Question

I take a lot of screenshot during testing of apps, and i usually use them in emails or in documentation. But i almost always use them scaled down in width and height. So i thourght it would be great if i could illiminate the manual step of starting Gimp to scale the image down, by having a rigth-click menu item that just scaled the image i right-clicked, down to a given width.

I know how to hack the registry in windows to add a right-click menu, so i need some small image tool to do the scaling by using a commandline interface.

Do you have any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use Image Resizer. It's free and open source.

Image Resizer for Windows is a utility that lets you resize one or more selected image files directly from Windows Explorer by right-clicking.

Answer 2

If you're still keen to use GIMP, I know that it has a batch mode:

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/

One of the options is:

-b, --batch=<commands>  Batch command to run (can be used multiple times)

You could write a script and get it to execute when your right-click menu is run. The only thing I'm not sure about is how to pass the file name from the right-click menu to the script, although if you see the link I have posted below, it seems to be automatically passed as an argument at the end of the command string. You might have to experiment with this a bit until you get the desired result.

This is only if you need to gain some sort of fine-grained control over the menu action (or you are a script enthusiast/DIYer like myself). It would also allow you to run other filters (e.g. auto-contrast, watermarking) if you wanted to. Otherwise the above solution looks okay (haven't tested).

P.S. you don't necessarily need to edit the registry to create one of these actions. See http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-add-remove-entries-from-the-right-click-menu/