Batch image conversion with Converseen

One Fell Swoop


Instead of wearing out your mouse finger converting masses of images from one format to another, use Converseen to handle this task as a batch operation with the convenience of a GUI.

By Karsten Günther

If you need to convert an image from one format to another, you can load the image in GIMP and save it in the required format. But, if you need to convert dozens, or even hundreds, of images, you need a batch converter. Experienced users turn to ImageMagick tools or (preferably) their GraphicsMagick counterparts on the command line. Enter Converseen [1], a GUI-based tool for mass image conversion.

Batch Operations

Ubuntu and many other distributions automatically integrate Converseen into their menus, where the program is listed in the Applications | Graphics section. Converseen is really simple to use: Just load the images, choose the required target format, name the target folder, convert, and you're done. The tool handles more than 100 formats that are supported by ImageMagick as input and output files.

Pressing Open images and Add images (Figure 1) loads the images; you can Shift- or Ctrl-click to select multiple images. This introduces Converseen to your images but does not select them for conversion, as you can see from the checkboxes to the left of the file names. The buttons in the bottom line control the selection.

Figure 1: Converseen has a simple interface, which is fine for the few options the program needs.

Convert to lets you select the target format for the selected images, and you can select only one format to which the software will then convert your files. PDF, TIFF, and a number of other formats could easily accommodate multiple images in a single file, but Converseen currently doesn't give you this option. Pressing Convert starts processing all the selected images, taking the current options into consideration.

Converseen currently doesn't offer much in the line of options: Image settings lets you set the compression rate (and for JPG, thus, the quality) for PNG and JPG. To the left of the window, you also have the option of scaling images via the Dimensions parameter. The directory in which Converseen will store the results and the file names to use when it does so are configured in Output options.

Conclusions

Converseen definitely doesn't cover the full functional scope of Convert, but the features that Converseen does offer work very reliably because of the choice of underlying libraries.

Installation

Prebuilt packages for Converseen did not exist when this issue went to press. To install Converseen, first download the current source code archive (version 0.3) off the web [2] and unpack the archive. An easy approach to doing this is to use the aunpack program provided by the Atool [3] package.

After changing to the directory created by unpacking the archive, type qmake to create a makefile, and then run make against the file. You will need QMake variant version 4 here; Ubuntu calls this qmake-4qt, for example. Other QMake versions will cause errors.

Of course, you will need to have the matching developer packages in place, but your package manager should handle this automatically. The complete chain of commands for the install is as follows:

$ tar -xvf converseen_0.3_src-tar.bz2
$ cd converseen_0.3
$ qmake && make
$ su
# make install

Before taking the final step, it is a good idea to check what Make intends to do for a global installation. The -n option tells make to show you the intended actions (see Listing 1). You will see that Converseen wants to install in /usr/bin rather than in /usr/local/bin, which is the normal location. If you want to prevent this, you need to modify the makefile or run the actions manually, changing the target to /usr/local instead of /usr.

Listing 1: Make -n Options
01 # <b>make -n install<b>
02 test -d /usr/bin/ || mkdir -p /usr/bin/
03 install -m 755 -p "converseen" "/usr/bin/converseen"
04 test -d /usr/share/converseen/ || mkdir -p /usr/share/converseen/
05 install -m 644 -p /tmp/converseen_0.2.1/loc/converseen_it_IT.qm /usr/share/converseen/
06 install -m 644 -p /tmp/converseen_0.2.1/loc/converseen_pl_PL.qm /usr/share/converseen/
07 install -m 644 -p /tmp/converseen_0.2.1/loc/converseen_hu_HU.qm /usr/share/converseen/
08 test -d /usr/share/pixmaps/ || mkdir -p /usr/share/pixmaps/
09 install -m 755 -p /tmp/converseen_0.2.1/res/converseen.png /usr/share/pixmaps/
10 test -d /usr/share/applications/ || mkdir -p /usr/share/applications/
11 install -m 755 -p /tmp/converseen_0.2.1/res/converseen.desktop /usr/share/applications/
INFO
[1] Converseen homepage: http://converseen.sourceforge.net
[2] Converseen downloavd: http://converseen.sourceforge.net/download.html
[3] Atool: http://www.nongnu.org/atool/