Mario Bittencourt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am a Photoshop user (nobody's perfect) and I've been playing with
> Gimp for a while. Since photoshop can not do what I want (at least do
> not know how) I've decided to try to do the same thing under gimp.
>
> I need to apply a set of effects (such as resize, ajust levels,
> shapen etc) to a large group of files, saving them in another directory.
>
> I've developed an action under photoshop but it forces me to open
> the files manually and presse the " Go" button for each one.
>
> What I'd like to do is use Gimp (or other tool - in this case email
> me privately) to open all files located in a cretain directory, apply a
> predefined set of effects and save the files with the same name in a
> different directory.
>
> Since I've never worked with script-fu (I suppose I'll have to use
> that) I'd like to know if someone could send me some tips about this or
> even snippets of code to do what I want.
Mario-
I don't know what platform you are working on but I recently managed to
get some batch processing done in Linux using perl and the gimp-perl
module. In fact I have been lurking this list for a week or so as I was
trying to get this working.
Here is an overview of what I did to get this working and if anyone has any
comments like "Dummy, you did not have to go through all that you could
have done blah blah I would certainly be grateful.
First, A little background. I have a rudimentary knowledge of perl and
have been fairly involved in linux adminstration for several years. I have
an extremely basic working knowledge of gimp and almost no other graphic
tools.
The task that I ws trying to automate was the opening of a an animated gif
that is sent to us from a business partner and that is huge, 3.5 MB or so,
and sometimes comes with the layers compositing and sometimes replacing. I
need them to be replaced. I found, as I was trying to learn about this
image and why it was compositing rather than replacing that if I saved it
in gimp with the correct layer defaults, that the file size was reduced to
less than 200K.
This was perfect if only I could figure out a way to automate the gimp
steps.
I wanted all software installations to be accomplished via rpm to
facilitate the recreation of the environment on other machines. The
process is running in cron as a normal user
There are several issues I had to overcome:
1. 1. upgrading gimp to the latest I could find in order to justifiably
ask for help. The server and my test box are both running redhat 6.2
with several, but as I found not all, the upgrades availible from
redhat. I found an rpm that worked perfectly at
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/binary/RPMS/
2. 2. upgrading perl with the modules that would provide the hooks into
gimp.
3. 3. running on a machine with no X (gui interface ) running
4. 4. Figuring out what the syntax was in perl to call gimp
5. 5. trouble shooting errors
The packages that I installed were as follows:
perl-Gtk-Perl 0.7000 6 from
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/cpan/i386/
Mesa 3.2 2 redhat cd
perl-PDL 2.003 6
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/6.2/cpan/i386/
gtk+ 1.2.8 1
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/binary/RPMS/RedHat-6.2/RPMS/i386/
gimp 1.2.0 1 ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/binary/RPMS/
gimp-perl 1.2.0 1 ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/binary/RPMS/
XFree86-Xvfb 3.3.6 20 redhat cd
Ther perl modules alread installed were:
perl 5.00503 2
perl-libnet 1.0605 2
perl-Tk 800.018 1
perl-HTML-Parser 3.05 6
perl-libwww-perl 5.47 6
perl-URI 1.05 6
perl-Net-SSLeay 1.05 5
I had to upgrade glib package to install the new gtk+ on one of the boxes
I then had to make sure there was an X display that gimp could use,
otherwise the script would hang and gimp showed up in a ps axf output as
defunct.
This was not a problem until I moved to the X-less server. On the server I
started Xvfb with the following line in a script startXvfb:
scripts]$ cat startXvfb
Xvfb :1 -screen 0 10x10x8 -pixdepths 1 -fp
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/
I leave this running on the server started as the user the cron process
runs as with the following command line:
nohup startXvfb &
The perl program that does my conversion is called radarsave.pl:
scripts]$ cat radarsave.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print "entering $0\n";
use File::Basename;
$numargs = @ARGV;
$progname= basename($0);
if ( $numargs != 2 ){
print " the number of args is $numargs\n";
print "Incorrect number of arguments. \nUsage $progname infile outfile\n";
exit 1;
}
use Gimp;
use Gimp::Fu;
#set_trace is important to see what gimp is doing.
#You don't get this in script-fu as far as I could learn
Gimp::set_trace(TRACE_ALL);
Gimp::init;
print `date '+%b %d %T' `."loading $ARGV[0]\n";
my $img = Gimp->file_gif_load("$ARGV[0]","$ARGV[0]");
print "
