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Batch image resizing, dimensions fixed, quality dependant on eventual file size?

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suleika:
I have not one but two digicams now and I'm really getting into it as a hobby, and I'm doing quite well at organising the photos I work on, but the ones I don't work on are a bit of a mess and are taking up a lot of space.  Some of them I want to keep intact for working on in the future, and the rest I want to save as smaller jpg files (for reference, memento etc) and delete the originals.  A few of them I'm going to process by hand, but most of them could be batch processed.

Most of the originals are jpgs of (approx) either 3000x2000 and 1.5-3.5 MB, or 4200x3400 and 1.5 -5 MB.  (I'm not doing anything with my RAW files yet.)  I've tested quite a few and I've worked out that I'd like to make the files 1 MB but have them no smaller than 1000 pixels on the shorter side.  This won't be a one-off job; I'll be doing this every time I shoot.

I'm trying very hard to satisfice here rather than optimise - these photos are rejects, after all (I mainly want to be able to see why I rejected them, refer to the EXIF data, and also to keep a chronology alongside the photos I am keeping).  But the files vary in size quite a lot - and so if I use FastStone Image Viewer, for example, and set the shorter side at 1000 pixels, and set the jpg quality to give me an average file size of 1MB, I end up with quite a lot of files considerably smaller and larger than 1MB (and the setting would be different from batch to batch anyway).

Is there a smart way of doing this?  Does anyone know of a program that will deliver a file 1000 pixels short-side at 100% quality, unless result is more than 1MB, in which case try 99%, unless result is more than 1MB, in which case try 98%, etc etc?

Alternatively, is there a program that will simply reduce the quality of the jpg to a given file size (1MB) without resizing?  And can anyone tell me how different the result will be from a re-sized file (new dimensions) in terms of quality?  I would have thought it would be much the same when viewed at the same size on the screen.

I'm aware, by the way, that if I were to use a percentage as the quality setting then the resultant files would have a neatly consistent relationship to their originals, but I don't want to go that route, even though it would be easier to manage.  Firstly, the originals with smaller file sizes are the ones to benefit from not being over-compressed and the byte-rich files can afford it.  Secondly, if I can get the files near to 1MB each it will make accounting for future file storage extremely easy.

Alex Yakovlev:
Batch file processing is a feature of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo. All you should do is to setup actions performed on individual image file, select source and destination files/folders and click Start. However, it is commercial.

suleika:
I appreciate the swift reply.  Are you familiar with its particular batch processing possibilities?  Will it do either of those things I describe? 

CWuestefeld:
The app "Multiple Image Resizer" (http://www.multipleimageresizer.net/) will easily do the scaling including the smart "short side=1000" that you describe. But neither this nor anything else I've seen does the image-size targeting you ask for.

Frankly, this seems to be orders of magnitude more trouble than it can be worth. With the cost of storage these days, who cares if the output is 1.2MB rather than 1MB? And I don't discard any photos. In fact, I keep an archival copy straight from the camera, plus any edits separately, and I can easily backup my whole library onto 2-3 DVD, in under an hour.

suleika:
If no program will do it, then so be it.  If I can find one, I shall use it, and it will not be more trouble than it is worth to me.

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