My First Open Source Project

In my first post, I mentioned my first project that I worked on in Python, called BatchEdit. I recently decided to host it on GitHub in order to motivate myself to work on it some more as well as to generate interest in the project.

BatchEdit is a command-line batch photo editor. Basically, you give it an input and output folder and specifiy some adjustments to be done, such as resizing, sharpening, boosting contrast, adding a border, etc. Here is an example of what the command looks like to auto-rotate, increase contrast, convert to grayscale, resize to 720 pixels, sharpen, add a gray border of 5 pixels, and overlay a watermark:

python scripts\BatchEdit.zip --input C:\input --output C:\output
--autorotate --resize 720 --grayscale --contrast 1.2 --sharpen 1.3
--border 5,gray --watermark C:\logo_transparent.png

Here is what the resulting transformation looks like:

In my mind, the most common use case for this program is preparing photos to upload to the web. Often photographers want to auto-rotate, resize, sharpen, and apply some basic adjustments such as boosting the contrast or saturation before uploading. If you have many photos to edit, doing this manually in a program like photoshop is quite tedious.

Under the hood, the code takes advantage of the Python Imaging Library (PIL) for all image manipulation.

Currently there are a few shortcomings of the program. First, it requires that the end user have Python and PIL installed on his system. Second, it does not yet have a GUI on top of it. These limitations would probably keep all but the most expert users from using it.

Batch photo editors have certainly been done before, but I think mine is simpler than most. To see the source code, click here.