Hi folks,

at the moment I'm investigating workflow possibilities for photos (mainly on linux). So there are programs for organizing and viewing, like digiKam, F-Spot and Geeqie, programs for editing, like dlRaw and gimp, and libraries (or commandline tools) like gmic and ImageMagick.

For my personal workflow I want the programs to interact, this means for example, I want one kind of tagging and rating, and this should be the same in all used applications... Another thing, I don't want to open a photo in several applications one after another, to get each step in one application done. This costs time, and it is very easy to loose metadata, color profiles or image quality (did I say time?).

For me there was one essential step missing. After editing in dlRaw some pictures need aditional work in gimp. Ok, thats no problem, just one click and the image is in gimp. But then when finished there, I need a resized version for the web... Ok resizing is possible in gimp, but when comparing the results I didn't like the builtin algorithms of gimp. So I always used ImageMagick's convert on the command line. So, save the image, navigate to the folder, open command line, typing the command with the right names... Not nice! 

Finally I found a way to get rid of this. So, here is a python script for gimp, which saves a temporary file, calls an ImageMagick command on that file, passes the result to gimp and cleans everything up. This script calls the Lanczos resizing algorithm, which gives a sharp and clear resized version without any need to sharpen afterwards, if the original image was sharp (same method as in dlRaw). Exif data and color profile is preserved within the script.

Of course this script idea is much more flexible, one could builtin other functions from ImageMagick, or any commandline tool which can handle tiffs, or one could program ones own filters without the need for a gui, and use an adopted script for the gui...

Installing is easy, make sure you have python enabled in gimp (python in gimp for windows), then copy it to your local gimp plug-ins directory and set the file executable. Of course you need the ImageMagick package for your system (on linux it is most likely installed; on windows you have to download and install it manually). Finally on windows you have to change the path for mogrify in the script according to your installation, but this is not hard at all, just look in the file.

So, have fun with a new resizing method in gimp. Comments and further ideas are very welcome

greets mike

UPDATE (03.02.2010): There is a new version of the script attached.