Faq

Questions

What is the need of a separate rename action if we can use the save action for renaming and to enumerate pictures?

The rename and save actions are different. Rename does what it is says: it renames the original file without opening the file. If you do save, it opens the file and will recompress it during the saving with a certain quality, dpi, etc, … This means always a loss of quality.

I'd like to invite you to join my website dealing with art tutorials.

Thanks for the invitation!! Links to Phatch are always welcome if they consist of the phatch logo and only link to http://photobatch.stani.be (all other urls are temporary and might change any moment).
Concerning joining your website… I certainly like when people make publicity, blog, promote phatch. However concerning documentation and tutorials I prefer to keep things central. I notice that quite some people post Phatch tutorials (and they basically do all the same thing) on the internet. I think Phatch users are much more helped if there is one good documentation site centrally. It would have been nicer if people would contribute their Phatch tutorials to me, so that instead of making all the same tutorial we would now have some different ones. I personally will review and polish every tutorial which is sent to me. Moreover you get full credits both on the site and in the Phatch application (about dialog).

Phatch compared to …

Gimp

I am an enthousiast Gimp user myself and Phatch is not at all a replacement for it.

In terms of image manipulation: whatever you can do with Phatch, you can achieve in Gimp. However you can do a lot in Gimp, you won't be able to do with Phatch. So if you are looking for the next generation Gimp, Krita, … you are in the wrong place.

Despite that Phatch has some interesting differences with Gimp:

  • Phatch ships with certain pre-made recipes which would take manually more time in Gimp. What you can do in Phatch with five clicks on thousands of images, will take much more time in Gimp.
  • Phatch does not work with single images but with any amount of image files or folders at once. You can download somewhere an unofficial batch plugin for Gimp, but it is not easy to use, if you can get it to work. With Phatch you only have to drag and drop some actions. Phatch is only about batching, not about manipulating an individual image
  • Phatch can handle folder hierarchies and perform operations on them.
  • Phatch doesn't require any graphical skills as long as you can drag and drop. Some people without graphical skills will be able to do certain tasks with Phatch, while they would hardly or never achieve in Gimp.

And Phatch can also do things which you can't do with Gimp:

  • The graphical user interface in Phatch is optional. You can use Phatch as a command-line application with the advantage that you can prepare the actions in a gui. You can run Phatch on servers with the only need of having python-imaging installed and you can even control it interactively over the (ssh) terminal. Gimp needs a graphical X environment and therefore not so suitable for most servers. Phatch might support a graphical web interface in the future.
  • Phatch can save exif & iptc tags to images
  • Phatch supports CMYK, YCbCr, 32-bit integer pixels and 32-bit floating point pixels colour modes, all of which are unfortunately missing in Gimp. I actually use Phatch to make my Gimp work ready for printing.
  • Phatch supports exif renaming or copying of image files
  • You can create desktop droplets (similar to Photoshop droplets). These desktop droplets sit on your desktop. Whenever you throw image files or folders on them, it will batch process the images and show a progress dialog box.
  • Data stamping: You can write any combination of exif or iptc tags (date, time, aperture, shutter speed, … or other info) automatically on a collection of images.
  • With Phatch you can set up automatic workflows with task scheduling.
  • With Phatch you can compare and filter exif & iptc data of multiple images.

Imagemagick

Phatch and imagemagick basically have the same purpose, but have a different user experience. Imagemagick is command-line based and Phatch has a Graphical User Interface (GUI). As such Phatch is much more simple to use and also makes it more easy to create complex actions and handle subdirectories. As Phatch is developed with the Python Image Library, writing plugins is a breeze as Phatch generates the GUI automatically.

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