subogero linux blog

I’ve got that other blog. About Psychlismo. Which, while being the hard sport that it is, has its advantages as well. You may be out of oxigen, but at the same time, a spectacular view may just take your breath away.

Which means photographs. Which in turn get uploaded to the blog. WordPress has a nice interface to do that, a thumbnail image will be created automatically, which you can insert into the text right away. There are a few problems though. If the image is too big, the thumbnail is not generated. And it’s rather cumbersome to upload a high number of images one by one via this GUI.

The bulk upload is sorted out easily. During the brief history of computing, humanity has invented various protocols to transfer files. But these protocols do not create thumbnails. Bulk thumbnailing, and rotating for that matter, has to be done before and, in my case, Google has found the solution very quickly:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

Become Mr Rightclickalot, open Nautilus (Gnome’s file manager), navigate to the directory of the new images, select and right-click a bunch of them, select “Resize Images…” and a dialog-box appears with the options. You can chose the new size. You can resize them in place or make a copy with “.resized” appended to the filename. Or you can change that to “.thumbnail” to please WordPress.

Now try it with another bunch of images. Yes, all your previous settings are forgotten, and the suffix is “.resized” again. And Gnome, being the Epitomy of Usability, offers exactly zero options to change the default settings.

But don’t give up just yet! If Mr Rightclickalot has failed, the Config Wizard will sort it out. Every program has some sort of config file:

/usr/share/nautilus-image-converter/nautilus-image-resize.glade

Search for “.resized”, replace by “.thumbnail” and enjoy. It’s easy to find all the other default settings as well. Bonus: nautilus-image-converter can rotate pictures as well. I’ve not uploaded any image via the WordPress GUI ever since.