How do I quickly standardize the size of my snaps?

[Dr. J]

Just curious if anyone knows of a good way to quickly make all of my snaps to fit within a maximum height and maximum width without stretching.  (I still want the vertical snaps to be tall and skinny).

Say for example I wanted them to all fit inside a 2"X2" window in a frontend.  Some would be the perfect square, but others that are naturally wide I would want to automatically size to 2" wide (leaving space vertically).  Vice versa for vertical snaps.  I wouldn't want to stretch the vertical snaps, I'd like it to automatically resize to 2" tall and be space on the sides.  

If anyone knows of a quick way to do this I'd be grateful.  Thanks---Jay

[SirPoonga]

Depends on the programming language you are using.  Some image objects can auto stretch to fit keeping aspect ration.

[Dr. J]

I should probably clarify.  I'm not programming a frontend.  Instead I'm looking for another program that will permanently change the picture sizes.  I'd rather not alter each picture individually.  That would take some time.

[Howard_Casto]

No offense but that is a really dumb idea for two reasons....

#1 Bigger files mean bigger file sizes.  Bigger file sizes mean more space on your harddrive and more data for the frontend to load, thus slowing down the fe dramatically in some cases.  

#2 You will get absolutely NO benefit by doing this.  As the images were tiny to begin with the process of blowing them up will not help the quality one bit.  Yes you can do various resampling effects, but it's merely taking a bad image and fuzzing it up so it doesn't look so bad.  

If the fe your using doesn't auto scale images to the size of the snapshot area then I suggest you find another one.  I don't know of a single one that doesn't auto scale or at least auto stretch.  

[u_rebelscum]

IrfanView.  Freeware for private use.  Not perfect, but about 80-90% of the pictures seemed to work when I tested it.

Use: File - Batch Conversion/Rename.  Look at the help (F1) for details, but you can do a bunch of basic convertion stuff.  Make sure to add all the files, have an output folder, and use the advanced options with preserve aspect ratio checked.

Afterwards, check through the files and make sure they were all converted.  If a file wasn't for some reason, you can convert it by hand or try feeding it through the batch converter again.

Other graphic apps do this too.

BTW, I think you mean to shrink the images to a max 2" x 2" size, right?
If you want to stretch them bigger, I'm with howard and I don't advise it.

[Dr. J]

Yes, I'm looking to shrink the images (Which would give me a benefit).  The FE's that auto scale (and especially that autostretch) garble several of the games snaps.  

Thanks u_rebelscum.  I'll give that a shot.

[Minwah]

I think Dr J has perhaps used a FE which does not give the option/not used the option to keep the correct aspect ration of the snap.  Therefore the snaps are being stretched to 2"x2" or whatever wrecking the correct aspect.  Rather than re-size the images perhaps check for this option in your FE / try a different FE ?

[nipsmg]

go to www.download.com and look for "batch converter"

It's a program that allows you to select as many files as you want and convert them all in a batch to whatever format you want..


NipsMG

[Jakobud]

I used that IrfanView program mentioned above.  It works very well for this.

[Dr. J]

Thanks everyone.  IrfanView's what I needed.  --Jay