Browse Category: Tutorials

Changing File Date on Windows and Mac

Setting the wrong file date can get messy. There are times particularly for photos when we have to replace batteries on our digital cameras and having the camera reset the date and time to some default time in the past. Digital cameras typically do not come with a real time clock built into it and would hold charge enough between battery changes but if you do take the batteries out to charge overnight or to have them taken out because you would not use the camera for several weeks, you will find that the file date get reseted. So each time that happens, we will have to manually set the date and time all over again. That works fine for the most parts but I am not sure about you but I’ve face many times when I set the PM to AM or especially doing the start of the year, to have set the year on the camera to the year that has just past.

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Changing Photos EXIF and File Dates

Changing file dates ? Do it with ease.

Ever so often, we would need to replace the batteries in the digital cameras either during photo shoots or when we replace fresh batteries right before a photo outing. There is where we may face the issue of camera time. Unless the camera has internet connectivity and syncs the date time with time server, it is something we need to do manually. It can get complicated at times and it’s possible to get the date set wrongly, I have so many times. That’s where Batch JPEG Date Changer for Windows and CM Batch JPEG Date Changer for Mac comes to the rescue.

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Getting Dynamic Text Captions with Macros

The first time I’ve heard of macros was when I first used Microsoft Excel. Macros are defined as tiny snippets of programming codes to customize and enhanced the results on a spreadsheet or to perform repetitive tasks. In our applications, even though they do a lot of complicating codes at the background to get the result, it does work in a different manner. Here we used them much as a preset programming function calls. If you are familiar with programming, a function is a set of procedures to get a result. In the context of Text Captions, macros plays in an important role in making your text captions dynamic in a way.

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Harnessing the Power of EXIF Rotation

It might be hard to believe but there was a point of time when digital cameras cannot sense when you rotate them to take portrait photos and in the case of a smart phone, landscape pictures. Now all modern cameras come equipped with an orientation sensor and store this orientation information inside the JPEG File header or more technically known as the Exif header. Exif stands for Exchangeable image file format.

On a smart phone such as the iPhone, the photos will always show up in the right orientation because the built-in photo viewers read this settings but when posting the pictures to websites, it may not show up correctly and thus doing a real orientation change is needed.

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How to Resize Your Photos for your Website

One of the most common task performed by our Batch Imaging Application is the process of Downsizing Photos. Today’s digital camera can take pictures of tens of mega pixels which is great for viewing on the local computer and for printing as it contains a lot of minute details. However, these pictures are huge especially if you want them to be placed on your website or even to send over email.

In this tutorial, we will explore the Downsize by Pixels resizing method which will resize a picture down to a much smaller dimension. A pixel represents a single dot on the screen and the size of the pixel can vary from display to display. Modern phones and high definition displays can packed in more dots per inch than ever before. However, we use Pixels as that is the parameters uses in digital photography.

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Replacing Text within Filenames using Filename Changer

This is the second part to the Filename Changer Tutorial. Today we will dive deeper into the Smart Replace feature within Filename Changer. This feature is available with JBatch It, Batch It, Batch It Pro and Batch It Ultra.

What Smart Replace does is to allow you to replace specific text within your filename with another. Let’s consider this example, I have a named “combotiffcontrolcenter.png” and wanted to rename it to “batchitcontrolcenter.png”, I can utilize the Smart Replace feature to do it.

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How to Rename Your Photos in a Single Step ?

Digital Photos fresh out of a digital camera, mobile phone or a scanner will inevitable come with rather cryptic filenames which is not easily apparent as to what the photos are about. We would invariably have to spend hours to rename them, at least that’s how it was done in the past. One of the core features of our batch image processors is the ability to batch rename the photos to something which is more apparent to you.

In this little tutorial, we will explore two commonly used methods of file renaming which can be done with any of our batch image processors. They are to tag a Prefix and/or a Suffix to an existing filename and to rename the filenames using a running number.

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Scheduling Task on Windows

We are a society of task driven people and it would be nice if such tasks can be automated so that we can set them once and forget. Automating a task on Windows may sound complicated but by no means, it meant to be so. It probably will take under 10 minutes to set up a task in Windows’ Task Scheduler and you are set.

Both Batch TIFF Resizer and Batch It Ultra comes with versions that support Command Line parameters which is the starting point for task scheduling. These includes the Command Line Edition and the Server Edition. Both of which are made with different users in mind. The Command Line Edition is made to automate your personal task on your desktop and the Server Edition is made to run a central server or web server. Knowing that Microsoft Windows has an excellent scheduling system in place, it did not make sense to mirror it.

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Why is Resizing Photos Important ?

We will explore the question of the importance of resizing photos for the web and a few reasons to do so.

It is not uncommon to find Digital Cameras which are capable of taking a 16 megapixel images and some like the Canon EOS 5DS is capable of taking up to 50.6 megapixel photos. These all translate into pictures which contains greater details than ever before. There are discussions as to how many megapixels our eyes can see but since our eyes are not cameras, that number can range anything from 5 to 576 megapixels. What our eyes can see is another discussion we would not get into as we are no scientists.

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Getting the Best JPEG Quality and File Size

As I’ve mentioned in a prior tutorial on Lossless JPEG Rotation, through the years of experience, I find that setting JPEG Quality to 75% would yield the best file size to quality ratio. JPEG or JPG is probably one of the most used image format because it uses a compression algorithm which provides the smallest possible file size amongst all the other 24 bit image formats and that is important when it comes to putting pictures on the web. You wouldn’t want to have to wait several minutes to view a picture on the ultra-expensive LTE mobile data line so file size is essential.

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