Ubuntu – How to batch convert images to b/w while preserving the folder structure

13.04batchconvertimagemagick

I want to batch process images but I have a very specific task that I want to do

  1. I do not want to change image type
  2. I want to make them black and white
  3. I want it to create/preserve images and sub folder structure

I did this in Photoshop but it did not preserve folders and sub folder content it just threw every converted file in one directory.

My only hope is Linux 😀

Thank you in advance!

You can see different discussion about this here but Basharat Sial worked for me

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2143992

Best Answer

We can use convert command to convert images to black & white:

convert -colorspace GRAY image.png b-w_image.png

Where image.png is the input image and b-w_image.png is output imgage.

Combining this command with find we can create a bash one liner to convert all the images found under parent directory.

How-to:
Open terminal by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T, cd to parent/main directory and run the following command:

for img in $(find . -iname '*.png'); do echo -n "Converting $img"; convert -colorspace GRAY $img $img && echo ' [Done]'; done

It will convert and overwrite all the images under parent directory. I will suggest to test it on some temporary images and if you're satisfied with the results than run it on actual images.

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