Jon Simpson’s Weblog

Recently, i needed to write some scripts to deal with large numbers of websites that needed screencapped, thumbnailed and uploaded. Not wanting to attempt to get Windows to peform this task, I obviously looked to my powerbook’s bash scripting capabilities to get the job done. In doing this, i was stopped in my tracks by a need to resize and change the format of images without user intervention. Of course, the first thing I started looking for was a build of imagemagick, but a few posts on mac specific bulletin boards pointed to a cleaner solution.

That solution is sips. The “scriptable image processing system” by self-description and a tool built right into Mac OS X, using all of the format support and output support available to the OS.

sips -s format jpeg test.png --out test.jpg
sips -s format jpeg --resampleWidth 100 test.png --out test_small.jpg

This powerful tool is quite obscure, and infrequently mentioned a lot, so I figured I’d flag it to the attention of anyone who may care. OS X users can type man sips to get a whole load of useful information about parameters and additional options.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 18th, 2005 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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