Recently I installed Linux for a friend’s mother. She had been running Microsoft Windows Millenium Edition until it just refused to boot. She asked me for help. I could not get the machine to boot, either, so lacking the ME installation media, I suggested she try Linux. She was very willing.
She has a Polaroid FunFlash! 640 camera that has a serial interface. This camera is very limited (being old) in its abilities. It stores images in .ppm (portable pixel map). These files are huge. A 640×480 image (the maximum/only resolution the camera supports) is nigh unto a megabyte in size. Yowzers. She wants (at my insistence) to save them in a better (read smaller) format. I began searching for command line options for converting from .ppm to, say, .jpg. ImageMagick has a commandline utility for converting files. The syntax is simple: ‘convert oldfile.ppm newfile.jpg’. The problem is she has many files to convert. Manually entering each new file name would be tedious and time consuming. Then I stumbled upon the ImageMagick command ‘mogrify’. The best user interfaces are the simplest user interfaces. To convert multiple files, one simply needs to enter ‘mogrify -format jpg *.ppm’. ImageMagick handles the renaming auto*magick*ally.
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— topher Apr 1, 12:38 PM #
— Eric Pell Apr 22, 01:36 PM #