How to easily resize images via command-line?

Question

I would like to know how to resize images in Ubuntu. What is the easiest tool to do so?

Related: How can I scale all images in a folder to the same width? — kenorb, Aug 29 '15 at 20:32
http://sourcedigit.com/20632-install-converseen-on-ubuntu-16-04-batch-image-resizer-converter-for-linux/ — Ferroao, Aug 28 '17 at 23:55

score 424 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 12 '23 at 08:17

424

First, install ImageMagick via:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then, open a terminal and run this command:

convert -resize 20% source.png dest.jpg

It will reduce the size to 20%, not by 20%.
The resulting image will be much smaller, 20% of the former size, and not 20% smaller than before.

You can also specify the size in pixels:

convert -resize 1024X768 source.png dest.jpg

You can also use: mogrify command-line tool from the same package.

edited Sep 12 '23 at 08:17

Matthias Braun

1,043

answered Nov 18 '10 at 12:59

aneeshep

30,321

6

the command reduces the size to 50%, not by 50%. – Matthias Weiler Nov 15 '17 at 17:06
@MatthiasWeiler those are identical, not sure what you mean – Alexander Mills Jan 01 '18 at 00:08
13

They are only identical for the special case of 50%. -resize 10% makes your image 90% smaller. – Matthias Weiler Jan 10 '18 at 15:08
if you get an error "no images defined.." it is probably because you did not define destination image... e.g. in the above example, dest.jpg is a must :) – Ramesh Pareek Jan 11 '18 at 03:07
you talk about mogrify too; here the differences: https://deparkes.co.uk/2015/03/16/useful-imagemagick-commands/ – mattia.b89 Jan 11 '19 at 18:23
I threw together a small script around ImageMagick "convert" to handle the boring stuff about source and target directories in case one wants to convert many images: https://gist.github.com/dtonhofer/6c44186d65d3b15784b64096e60195a0 – David Tonhofer Jul 03 '19 at 16:10
re: batch processing (1) https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/516440 (2) http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/basics/#mogrify_not – michael May 19 '20 at 08:35
probably that should be dest.png, to match the format of the source image. – Will Nov 12 '20 at 08:15
mogrify overwrites the image whereas convert creates a new file. – Timo Nov 28 '20 at 19:33
Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:21
Looks like it defaults to 80% compression (precision 8) -- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024947/is-it-possible-to-tell-the-quality-level-of-a-jpeg In my opinion, if quality really matters, then you want 90%, but 80% should be enough for most purposes. – PJ Brunet May 17 '23 at 15:20

score 213 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 25 '23 at 10:26

213

nautilus-image-converter is a nautilus extension to mass resize or rotate images. To install nautilus-image-converter in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

sudo apt install nautilus-image-converter

It adds two context menu items in nautlius so you can right-click and choose "Resize Image". (The other is "Rotate Image").

You can do a whole directory of images in one go if you like and you don't even have to open up an application to do so.

You need to restart your nautilus to see new context menus, run nautilus -q and then click the Home folder icon to reload nautilus with the new plug-in.

edited Feb 25 '23 at 10:26

karel

114,770

answered Aug 05 '10 at 15:46

Richard Holloway

30,568

Does it work with multiple selections (ie i select 10 files - right click - select Rotate - and the 10 images are rotated) ? – teo96 Nov 18 '10 at 16:06
I'm not sure if restart isn't required. I just installed it, closed all nautils windows and opened new, and I don't have this option. I need to check again after restart. – Damian Melniczuk May 14 '13 at 17:42
2

Does not work in Ubuntu 13.10 :( – malisokan Nov 11 '13 at 17:28
1

Works great in Fedora 20, too. sudo yum install nautilus-image-converter – Greg Sheremeta May 09 '14 at 19:05
Installs but does not seem to work in 14.04 either :( – cboettig Jun 15 '14 at 01:37
4

It works on Ubuntu 14.04. Thanks. – Saeed Zarinfam Aug 22 '14 at 08:41
11

I think you need to log out or reboot after installing it--or just do what I did; run pkill nautilus and then click the Home folder icon to reload nautilus with the new plug-in. – Lambart Mar 31 '15 at 22:12
3

...or just run nautilus -q as someone added to the answer since my last comment. :) – Lambart Dec 12 '16 at 18:54
Worth noting, there also is a (apparently identical) thing for Cajaj: sudo apt-get install caja-image-converter – Frank N Jul 28 '18 at 11:13
3

Downvoted because this requires interacting with a GUI, even though OP asked for a command-line tool. – byxor Dec 30 '18 at 21:15
1

Wrong answer downvote. Does not work in command line. – 777Anon Feb 14 '19 at 13:41
Worked on Ubuntu 21.04 comman line. Great tool, exactly what I needed! Thank you :) – thomas77 Jun 30 '21 at 21:01
Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:21

score 165 · Answer 3 · edited May 09 '17 at 14:23

165

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

The command mogrify overwrites the original files with the resized images:

mogrify -resize 50% *.png      # keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize 320x240 *.png  # keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize 320x240! *.png # don't keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize x240 *.png     # don't keep image aspect ratio
mogrify -resize 320x *.png     # don't keep image aspect ratio

^{Note: You can add -auto-orient to automatically orient converted images.}

edited May 09 '17 at 14:23

kenorb

10,347

answered Feb 07 '11 at 12:05

Eric Johnson

6,235

Don't keep aspect ration with convert: convert hospital.jpg -resize 2000x! hospital_2000.jpg – Adobe Oct 05 '13 at 22:15
2

Perfect and simplest possible answer with both situations. love it ! – navderm May 14 '15 at 19:02
4

the initial images are replaced with the new resized ones. in case you need the initial ones, make a backup – Oct 26 '16 at 08:53
320x does keep image aspect ratio. It sets the height to the appropriate value, thus the ratio is kept. Maybe you confused something here? – phil294 Jun 13 '22 at 15:05
Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:21

Oli · Answer 4 · 2010-08-05T16:00:35.523

23

If you're just doing a couple of images, most image editors in Ubuntu (Gimp, F-Spot, etc) will let you do a basic resize.

If you want to edit tens, hundreds or thousands of images, I prefer Phatch. Phatch is a GUI-based batch photo editor that will let you perform a whole load of transformations on images. sudo apt-get install phatch

ImageMagick is good but it's a bit tedious if you don't know the setting names for things. You can very quickly learn Phatch by clicking around.

edited Aug 05 '10 at 16:00

answered Aug 05 '10 at 15:25

Oli

293,335

F-Spot does resize? Where? – Martin Jul 23 '13 at 11:17
While installing phatch my Chrome Browser got closed and I was unable to relaunch it, I had to remove phatch and other packages it installed to get chrome back to working state. – mallaudin Apr 25 '17 at 19:12

score 17 · Answer 5 · edited May 09 '17 at 14:27

ImageMagick is the package you want. It contains a number of useful command line tools for this very purpose.

Here's a simple tutorial explaining how to batch resize images:-

mogrify -resize 320x240 *.jpg

After this command is completed, all of the images will be replaced with resized version of themselves. Notice that in an effort to preserve the image aspect ratio, mogrify may not be produce images that are exactly 320x240. To force this to happen, modify the original command to by placing an exclamation point at the end of the desired resolution:

mogrify -resize 320x240! *.jpg

Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:21 — Nam G VU, Nov 10 '22 at 08:21

score 15 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 23 '15 at 09:06

15

No need to install any new software just do this

convert -resize 50% myfigure.png myfigure.jpg

or

convert myfigure.png -resize 200x100 myfigure.jpg

answered Feb 23 '15 at 09:06

Pawan

469

5

No new software - except for imagemagick, the package that contains convert. – Chris Jenks Dec 24 '19 at 18:29
Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:21

score 11 · Answer 7 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

At the moment nautilus-image-converter does not work in Ubuntu 13.10. Therefore I use imagemagick on the command line, which is very good workaround (at least for me).

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Keep in mind the difference between these imagemagick tools:

Mogrify does processing on the same image, it reads file modify file and writes the output to the same file.
Convert is meant to work on separate images, reads file and modify and write to different file/format. You can also use convert command to use output file same as input file.

I often use mogrify to simply resize multiple images and overwrite the original files. I. e. this command would scale down the dimension of all JPG files to 40% of the original dimension:

mogrify -verbose -resize '40%' *.JPG

Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:22 — Nam G VU, Nov 10 '22 at 08:22

Tommy Brunn · Answer 8 · 2010-08-05T15:15:30.153

8

GIMP is probably the easiest way, since it has a fairly simple UI for such common tasks. All you have to do is open up your image and go to Image → Image Size and then change accordingly. There are ways to do batch resizing using the GIMP as well, but I don't know them by heart.

edited Aug 05 '10 at 15:15

answered Aug 05 '10 at 15:08

Tommy Brunn

9,751

score 8 · Answer 9 · edited Jul 22 '17 at 00:31

8

Install gthumb. Simple and easy for basic image handling and editing functions - viewer, resizing, cropping, rotate, flip, grayscale, etc with options to save in JPEG, PNG, TIFF, TGA formats.

To install gthumb:

Open your terminal
Type sudo apt-get install gthumb
Accept the changes

edited Jul 22 '17 at 00:31

AnotherKiwiGuy

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answered Nov 10 '13 at 19:10

Parto

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1

On Linux Mint, it was optimal solution for me. – Fedir RYKHTIK Dec 18 '13 at 12:29
I am used to rotate my photos with gthumb. – Arpad Horvath Dec 28 '14 at 19:44
Please add the hint to your solution that you can set under gthumb->preferences->Viewer the zoom behaviour after (re)loading an image. Works great with svg files too. Reale saved my life when working with figures generated from matplotlib... – newandlost Sep 09 '20 at 11:23

Pierz · Answer 10 · 2018-04-24T10:15:54.747

7

You can also use the ubiquitous ffmpeg (or avconv) tool to resize images:

ffmpeg -i image.jpg -s 4096x2048 image-resized.jpg

And if you want really fast JPEG image resizing - try epeg (as mentioned here and there) - which needs to be built from source.

edited Apr 24 '18 at 10:15

answered Feb 02 '18 at 10:19

Pierz

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The quality is very good compared to convert and mogrify from ImageMagick. This is my favorite one. – fsevenm Sep 16 '19 at 10:02
Better compressed result is with optipng ref – Nam G VU Nov 10 '22 at 08:22

user.dz · Answer 11 · 2021-02-24T15:16:05.617

4

For GUI, Phatch "one click is worth thousand photos" is the best for such quick job. It is already in Ubuntu repository. It has plenty of actions and options as imagemagick.

sudo apt-get install phatch

Update:

Phatch project is DISCONTINUED unfortunately, last code commit was on 2011-01-24. It is on LP/Launchpad (Frameworks: Python2/PyGTK2.8)

edited Feb 24 '21 at 15:16

answered Feb 03 '14 at 09:29

user.dz

48,105

1

Not available to install for Ubuntu 20.04.2; gives "E: Unable to locate package phatch" – brewmanz Feb 24 '21 at 08:14
1

@brewmanz It is was discontinues, and pygtk2.8 was dropped from repository. – user.dz Feb 24 '21 at 15:23

score 4 · Answer 12 · answered May 18 '15 at 16:38

There is a good multiplatform tool called XnConvert. Combine and choose between more than 80 different operations. The installation is simple through deb. file from the official website.

It is free but not opensource, perhaps that's just the beauty of it.

enter image description here

score 1 · Answer 13 · edited Feb 20 '15 at 05:59

1

open the image in ImageMagick.

click on the image command box will be open.
view->resize enter the pixel you want. click on resize button.
File-> save, enter the name. click on Format button choose the format you want and click select button.
click on save button.

another option is select view -> original image and Drag the corners of the image to resize it. select File -> save.

edited Feb 20 '15 at 05:59

muru

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answered Feb 20 '15 at 05:55

Deepa

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hg8 · Answer 14 · 2015-12-15T09:11:14.990

1

I use Pimagizer. It works great and it is the easiest application I have used. Tested on Ubuntu 14.04, 15.04, 15.10.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vfrico/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pimagizer

See : https://launchpad.net/pimagizer/ for more infos.

edited Dec 15 '15 at 09:11

answered May 18 '15 at 15:24

hg8

13,462

How to easily resize images via command-line?

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