• Welcome to Photrio!
    Registration is fast and free. Join today to unlock search, see fewer ads, and access all forum features.
    Click here to sign up

Is there a way to apply changes to multiple Image files at once? (Specifically inverting negatives)

Elijah Willert

Member
Allowing Ads
Joined
Mar 18, 2022
Messages
25
Location
Wisconsin
Format
Medium Format
Is there software that you can select 100 files at once and apply the same settings to them? I want to invert multiple negative scans but don't want to invert every file separately in gimp. Thanks for any ideas!
 
This particular sub-forum is intended for discussion about the negatives prepared by people using inkjet printers for the purpose of contact printing - usually using traditional processes like cyanotype. I'm thinking that that isn't the sort of negative you are referring to.
If asking about files from camera digitized colour film negatives, I'm happy to move it to the Scanning and Scanners sub-forum.
 
I expect this thread will get moved - maybe to, "Misc. Hybrid Discussions" or "Scanning and Scanners"?

Editing multiple files at once is easily done using Lightroom or Photoshop. What you can do - and how you do it - is going to depend on what editing software you are using.
 
Elijah Willert said:
Is there software that you can select 100 files at once and apply the same settings to them? I want to invert multiple negative scans but don't want to invert every file separately in gimp. Thanks for any ideas!
Click to expand...

Depends on the software you use. Darktable can do that very easily
 
Yeah, my mistake. If you could move it that would be appreciated.
 
Done!
 
Elijah Willert said:
Is there software that you can select 100 files at once and apply the same settings to them? I want to invert multiple negative scans but don't want to invert every file separately in gimp. Thanks for any ideas!
Click to expand...

How long have you been using GIMP? Are you married to it?

I think someone who is motivated to learn how to do it can probably make GIMP do what you want. See this link about how to use a command line script to run GIMP in batch mode: <https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/> That is all gibberish to me, but some people like that sort of thing.

Personally, I much prefer and appreciate a good GUI (graphical user interface) - so for me, the better solution would be to find some other editing software that will do the job without me first needing to learn a new language.

good luck
 
Darktable is fantastic for this sort of thing-- First, it's got a built in module for converting negatives that works rather well, and second, it's very easy to selectively copy/paste settings from the stack of changes you've made on one image, to another batch of images.

In fact, Darktable doesn't actually alter the original image-- it just stores the changes as metadata, and applies those changes until you export a finished image.

The interface is a bit... quirky... but not nearly as much as say, Gimp.
 
$ mkdir inverted
$ for I in *.jpg; do convert $I -invert inverted/$I; done

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register