Phatch – Batch process thousands of images at once

Phatch is a photo batch processor with a nice graphical user interface. It supports all popular image formats and can duplicate folder hierarchies which makes it ideal for identically manipulating 1000s of images in one go. It can also be used to rename exif data in your photos. Phatch is based on Python and will work in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Recently, I snapped a significant number of photos when I visited the Bamboo festival. Each photo was over 3 MB size and if I needed to share it online, I will surely have to optimize it for the web. Believe me, editing photos when they run to hundreds is a mundane, repetitive, as well as time consuming process when you have to do it one after another. This is where an image batch processor like Phatch shines through.

Phatch interface

Phatch has a very clean and user friendly interface. I fired up Phatch and added a few readily available rules and clicked the run button. Phatch then prompted me to enter the full path where I had stored the photos, after which it started the batch execution. The short story being, what would have taken me at least an hour of tedious and repetitive work was accomplished in a few seconds time.

Phatch – Main Features

Apart from its main function which is to batch process all the images/photos in a specified folder, Phatch includes a number of frequently used actions that you can readily apply to your images. They are as follows -

• Resize an image
• Rotate or transform an image
• Convert from one image format to another
• Crop the image to desired size
• Apply shadows
• Apply rounded corners, perspective, and/or reflection.
• Supports a console version to batch photos on web servers.

All together,Phatch includes 35 ready made actions which you can apply to your images.

How to Install Phatch in Linux

You can install Phatch in all major Linux distributions via their respective package management tools.

In Ubuntu Linux, you install Phatch as follows :

$ sudo apt-get install phatch

In Windows or Mac OS X, you can download Phatch from its website and run it. The pre-requisite being, you need Python and its associated libraries namely – wxPython and PIL (Python Imaging Libraries) installed.