For those looking for a bit more power (or the flexibility of Python), I have to also point to the free Python Imaging Library at http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/.

I've used it on my OS X box for a good while now to help automate the creation and maintenance of my family web site. Python and OS X is such a nice combination!

(Not to dis Apple, just providing another option. Heck, these two could probably work in conjuction with each other well!)

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-Sean

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For Python scripters, there's also a comprehensive built-in interface to Panther's native graphics engine, Quartz. Resizing images can be 8 times faster with the heavily-optimized Quartz than PIL. The text, shape-drawing, and compositing features of Quartz are also available.

I have a sample code fragment for resizing JPEG images on my site.

If you have the Developer Tools installed, you can find other code samples focusing on the Quartz drawing and PDF features in /Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python/.

I was able to type:

sips -i

By the way, if anyone has used the Folder Actions for making previews by way of AppleScript and the Finder, this is MUCH FASTER!

Wow! Thanks for the great hint!

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> it would be nice if sips could walk a directory structure
> instead of having to babysit each folder.

if one has a bunch of folders with jpg images in them, then

% find . -iname "*.jpg" | xargs sips -i

will traverse the directory structure and add icon previews to each jpeg image.

fxt

I had spaces in several of the file and directory names. This confused xargs because it, by default, uses spaces as the delimiters between file names. If you use

find . -iname "*.jpg" -print0 | xargs -0 sips -i

Enjoy!

It looked sort of a nice way to create thumbnails for image files, but it turned rather useless for me since instead of just adding a thumbnail, it seems to delete the original file after creating a copy of it, effectively erasing the original creation date and any custom comments the file might have. Is there any trick for it not to mess with more than just adding (or updating) an icon to the resource fork?

First, create a copy of your image file yourself. Run the sips command over that COPY. Then view the info for the modified image (cmd-i). At the top of the info window is the tiny icon. Click on the icon so that it's surrounded by a blue line (look carefully! It's not very obvious.) Do a Copy command to put the icon image in the clipboard. Now view the info for your original image, click on the icon and Paste.

re: It looked sort of a nice way to create thumbnails for image files, but it turned rather useless for me since instead of just adding a thumbnail, it seems to delete the original file after creating a copy of it

answer: This is due to your wrong command; just add the new filename you want for the thumbnail after the filename to be cp'd:

cp /Users/me/documents/large.jpg /Users/me/documents/small.jpg

then execute a second command to resize the thumb into the wanted size:
sips -Z 180 /Users/me/documents/small.jpg -- 180 is the target pixel size
i also like the rotate function:
sips -r 90 /Users/me/documents/small.jpg

Nothing beats a Mac.