Damn JPEG's....how small to make them...

[bossman]

@all:

 

We use Irfanview here to allow the staff and students to batch resize their photos before uploading them to the shared areas.

 

Ohh and of course it's free:

Download IrfanView and its quick and you can network it, Hmmmmm what else can it do.....................................let me think.....................................................................................................................................................Lots and lots of things but its Friday and I have forgotten now.

[SteveBentley]

We show them how to compress images in Word, PPT and so on (they often forget though).

 

But that just applies JPEG compression and removes bits that have been cropped. If somebody takes an image which is 3000px wide and scales it down to fit, the Word document still contains the 3000px version - it doesn't resize it, just drops the quality.

[36Degrees]

Gah, don't talk to me about images!!!! Noticed a load of HDD space had gone awol on one of the shares so had a shufty.

 

As above, then...

 

Find a teacher has saved 1.75GB of photographs from a recent trip. Twice in the same folder.

 

Duplicate deleted, batch resized and folder now only about 300MB

[Duane_Dibbley]

A teacher had pictures of every single child in the school (~500) and decided to send them to print...in one document...which was 3gb. Print spooler wasn't happy and neither was the rest of our ageing decrepit network.

[danbuntu]

for batch resizing (and a host of other things) you might also want to take a look at:

 

ImageMagick: Convert, Edit, and Compose Images

 

it's free, open Source and will churn through directory's of images happily. Because it's command line it's also scriptable.

[enjay]

But that just applies JPEG compression and removes bits that have been cropped. If somebody takes an image which is 3000px wide and scales it down to fit, the Word document still contains the 3000px version - it doesn't resize it, just drops the quality.

 

Not true - you can specify the px density you wish to compress it to...

[enjay]

I personally don't even think the ART department need to be saving at 3488 x 2616 IMO...

 

When all they are doing is printing the whole image, I would agree with you - sometimes, however, they might wish to print a part of it in detail, so would take the 2x2cm bit and print it 20x20cm, at which point you may start noticing if the original had been 1024px. Potentially also true of media or theatre students, if they've taken pictures of performances, stages, set design or whatever from some distance away.

[registerforfree]

Find a teacher has saved 1.75GB of photographs

WOW!! 1.7GB thats neary 50p's worth of disk space, Major big deal.

[srochford]

Call me dim if you want, but how is this script supposed to be run? Is it supposed to be saved as a .bat file or something similar?

 

Sounds very useful, if I can understand what to do with it!

 

Also, how does it work? Do I need Office 2007 on the computer I run the script on to do the convert, or does it just do it the dirty way and edit the file's properties?

 

Sorry; should have added that much :-)

 

Save it as (say) convert.vbs (change the path, and number of days at the top if you want different values)

 

You need to have Office 2007 installed on the machine where you're going to run it

 

Open a command prompt and type:

 

cscript convert.vbs

 

and wait for it to run; you'll see it showing a list of filenames as it works.

 

What I would suggest you do the first time is to put a couple of existing Word files in c:\temp and let it run on that folder. Once you're confident it does what you expect then point it at a server folder.

[36Degrees]

WOW!! 1.7GB thats neary 50p's worth of disk space, Major big deal.

 

No, that's 3.5GB (1.75GB x2) on a share that only had 20GB spare.

[enjay]

WOW!! 1.7GB thats neary 50p's worth of disk space, Major big deal.

 

Ah, but what you're missing is that after the teacher does this, each class member saves their favourite ten into their own areas, then each one decides to print them out full-page but has to wait half-an-hour for the print spooler to deal with it, by which point the lesson is over and the children have gone. The print-jobs remain, however, meaning that over the course of the rest of the day, huge amounts of ink get wasted while subsequent classes are unable to print their work.

 

Later on, you realise that all these extra gigs of photos on the network are causing the virus scans and backups to take longer to execute, which is having a knock-on effect to other processes, or impacting performance the following morning because they're still running while users try and log in.

 

A bit later still, you realise that all the extra gigs of photos have also meant that your backup no longer fits on your tapes, meaning that other files have been omitted. The Headteacher or an A-Level student then asks you to restore an accidentally deleted or changed file, and you find you can't because their area was in the bit of the backup which got missed.

 

Still thinking this isn't a big deal?

[36Degrees]

A bit later still, you realise that all the extra gigs of photos have also meant that your backup no longer fits on your tapes

 

That's how I noticed initially, the fact that the backup job had increased by 6GB overnight! (Other stuff was legitimate - filming of Drama coursework)

[kennysarmy]

WOW!! 1.7GB thats neary 50p's worth of disk space, Major big deal.

 

look after the pennies my friend, look after the pennies....!

[SteveBentley]

Not true - you can specify the px density you wish to compress it to...

 

You can but I've never found it that effective - you still end up with massive files compared to taking the image out and resizing it in a proper graphics program and reimporting it at the correct size.

[enjay]

You can but I've never found it that effective - you still end up with massive files compared to taking the image out and resizing it in a proper graphics program and reimporting it at the correct size.

 

Probably true. The "compress" option still buys quite a lot of space back, though, plus it is only a few steps to remember and takes about 3 seconds.

[3s-gtech]

WOW!! 1.7GB thats neary 50p's worth of disk space, Major big deal.

 

Not on a RAIDed set of 15k U320 SCSIs running the biggest discs possible it's not! The users here saving personal photos by the GB in their My Docs will fill the server fairly soon. Bigger discs for it is not an option due to none being available on that interface. That means new server/SAN = £1000s. Therefore I'm pretty hot on regularly scanning user areas for oversize files and mp3s etc.

[enjay]

Therefore I'm pretty hot on regularly scanning user areas for oversize files and mp3s etc.

 

Let us also consider the potential legal implications behind these files. The issue with MP3 files is (fairly obviously) one of copyright, but that could also apply to the photos, especially those which were taken by people outside of the school.

 

Issues surrounding consent, the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts must come into it somewhere too.

[Domino]

In addition to this thread - I've just seen this, and it looks pretty cool

 

Photo Magician Batch Converts Your Images with Drag and Drop Ease - Batch Conversion - Lifehacker

[Domino]

Mwhahaha!

 

too slow

[elsiegee40]

I gave all staff and pupils 2 weeks warning at the start of this term and then deleted all jpeg files from personal login folders.

 

You could almost hear the server sigh with relief at the amount of free space created.

 

Actually, I was a bit more picky than I made out I was going to be, and did leave selected images for staff... as we're a tiny school it's relatively easy to do.

[Crowmanuk]

After reading this thread I got the xp powertools image resizer and had a bit of a play today, a 141meg folder full of pictures (32 pics at around 4meg each) shrank down to a lovely folder that was only 3.5meg, picture quality wasnt lost too much either, I set it to large image size, 1024 along the bottom and compared the large and small images and there wasnt much in it, tomorrow i'm going to have a purge on all the crap, er images on the drives, that should make our backups a hell of a lot smaller.

[srochford]

I might be missing something, but why not just impose quotas? That way, users have to decide what to do - you can give them guidance as to how to make their files smaller but they have to take responsibility.

 

@elsiegee's method of checking through folders is good for a small school but won't work for an average secondary school or larger - there are just too many folders so you need an automatic process.

 

Using any of the mentioned tools to automate file size shrinking will work but you run the risk of destroying important work. Of course, most of the pictures taken and saved on the network are rubbish (to be kind) and shrinking them won't lose anything but I'd be surprised if there were no users taking good photos at high res which they need to look like that.

 

@gshaw's comment about the price of disc storage is correct - high speed storage is very expensive compared to USB SATA drives - but there's no reason you can't do some kind of hierarchical storage.

 

Not really worked out details of how to do this but I would imagine that you could move bitmaps older than (say) 1 year onto an external drive. If you do this once a month you could keep all these files for a year. If someone says "I need the files back from 12 months ago" you can quickly move them back to live storage. If they don't ask for them for a year after they were archived then you can safely delete.

[LeMarchand]

I might be missing something, but why not just impose quotas?

 

Tried it, teachers apparently don't see why they should have to make the effort to keep their files organised (or even to turn down the settings on the cameras).

[enjay]

I might be missing something, but why not just impose quotas?

 

You can only impose quotas on home areas, not on the shared departmental or curriculum areas, nor on NAS drives and such like.

[kennysarmy]

We use quotas but just to impose a limit from somone doing something REALLY stupid so it's high - around 4.7Gb.

 

I've just been given the go ahead to start batch reducing ALL photos on the servers in all year 7-11's home folders.

 

I'm going to use ABC to reduce the longest dimension of each JPG I find to 1200 px.

 

 

In total (years 7-13) we have over 100,000 JPG's stored taking up 170Gb

 

Project will take a while to complete but I'm hoping to reclaim around 70Gb