Comments on: Image Manipulation from the Command Line

By: Ben Lavery

Ben Lavery — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:52:32 +0000

Thanks for this Kirk, really interesting and useful article.

For those wanting to find out more about sips, open up a Terminal window and type:
man sips
The `man` command displays the manual to a given command :)

By: juandesant@mac.c

juandesant@mac.c — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:26:31 +0000

Most "verbose" commands use — instead of -, that tends to be reserved for
single letter abbreviations.

And by the way, the text still uses a single dash…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 00:55:44 +0000

For tasks like this I really enjoy HBImageProcessor
[hogbatsoftware.com]. I also enjoy HogBay’s timer app, because like their
image-massager, it seems to provide the most essential functionality in the
smallest and simplest way.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:44:29 +0000

You can use ImageWell to do more than just resize your images with just drag and drop. Btw, i had an article about sips some time ago as well. :)

By: Kirk

Kirk — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 20:14:39 +0000

Well, "looking in Terminal" is not exactly correct. In this case, I looked for
available tools, partly by using the whatis command, partly by searching on
Mac OS X Hints.

The whatis command is useful if you know what you want to do. For example,
typing whatis copy returns a list of commands whose descriptions contain the
word copy.

The other way is to get a good book (hint, hint; see my forthcoming book on
the command line, in the right-hand column? Up there, a bit higher) and
learn the basic commands and what they do. Then you’ll find it easier to
connect them to do more complex tasks.

By: jhaffner

jhaffner — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:54:56 +0000

Hi Kirk,

In the article above you mention looking in Terminal for commands that
might do what you want.

How exactly did you go about doing so? I’m not afraid of the command line,
but I often have trouble knowing about the available tools.

Thanks.

John

—
Don’t worry, it’s out of control.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:50:56 +0000

You’re right; sorry, I’ve fixed it in the text.

One of those rare commands that uses double-dashes.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 19:39:38 +0000

You are missing another dash (-) before ‘resampleWidth.’ I couldn’t get it to
work unless I used "sips –resampleWidth 120".

By: Kirk

Kirk — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 10:34:27 +0000

Good thought, but that assumes that you have Image Ready…

By: alec

alec — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 05:37:19 +0000

why not just make an image ready droplet?

i’ve got a couple of dozen lurking around to do each of the manipulations i want.

it is a bit top-heavy for a simple function but i find that adobe does the best job of jpeg and gif compression. byte for byte your graphics will look better.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 12:32:00 +0000

Sorry, you don’t type the $ – that’s the prompt you see on the command line.
I tend to present commands like that, in my writing, since it makes it more
clear what is the command and what is the output, if I show any.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 04:16:51 +0000

Dear Kirk,
i tried your solution but i receive this error message:

-bash: $: command not found

Why ?
Thanks, Luigi