sips

[Lewis, Benjamin (Ben)]

Hello Folks,

Has anyone begun using sips? ("Scriptable Image Processing System, a built in component of the OS X graphics subsystem")

I have a friend who is a graphic artist and long time Mac user. He's moved to OS X from 9 and likes it although he's a  card-carrying command line sceptic. He often asks "why all the hoopla about OS X internals? what can UNIX do for me?".

I discovered sips last night whilst browsing through macosxhints.com. It has some great potential and I'm sure I can prove the usefulness of the command line and build something he can use. He relies on Graphic Converter for batch image file conversions and is looking for something simpler and with no registration fee. I'm planning to wrap some Perl around sips and try to make him a simple batch conversion app.

My first attempt was the following test, I ran this on a set of around 50 images from a digital camera in separate sub directories :-

find . -name '*.jpg' |xargs -j % sips -s format bmp %

This works fine, the files are updated in place but the .jpg filename extension is not changed from jpg to bmp.

Has anyone done anything more useful with this utility?

Best regards

Ben