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Topic ClosedHow To Bulk Upload/Resize/Rename/Link Photos

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Direct Link To This Post Topic: How To Bulk Upload/Resize/Rename/Link Photos
    Posted: 14 Sep 2015 at 11:55am
How to Quickly Bulk Upload/Resize/Rename/Link Photos to NPOC

This is a guide intended to help you speed up the process of getting a large quantity of photos from your phone into the forum.

I'm sure there are differing ways of doing this and different tools to do this, but this is how I've been doing it and it works well.

It can be very time intensive to get your meet photos into the forum. Once you have these tools and do this once, you will see that it will save you hours. Do not be put off by the steps, this really is very quick to do.

For information, I am using an iPhone 5 and Windows 7 to do this, any device is fine.

It centres around five different processes:

1: Uploading to the Web
2: Bulk Resize
3: Bulk Rename
4: Bulk 'Get Links'
5: Append Links with IMG tags
6: Add to NPOC

1. Uploading to the Web

The first thing you need to do is get the photos from your device onto the web. Rather than use a photo hosting tool for this, we will be using a file storage tool. I use dropbox and I highly recommend using this. You can get a dropbox account for free online with a good amount of free space.

You want to be doing your next steps on your PC/laptop so use your PC/laptop to get your account here: https://www.dropbox.com/en/

Once you have your account, you will see a 'dropbox' area on your PC/laptop. For the purposes of our task here, create a folder (within the public folder) that matches the photo set you are doing, such as 'JAE2015'. For this guide, I have called my folder 'NPOCDemo'. Now download the 'app' for your phone/device and sign into your account. Your path should look like this:



Open the app on your device. Navigate to the new folder you created. Use the upload functionality in your new app to add all of your pictures to the web. You should now have photos in your folder when you look on your PC/laptop:



Well done, phase 1 is complete!

2. Bulk Resize

When our pictures are added to dropbox, they retain their original size which will be a lot bigger than you want for a forum. We now need to bulk resize to a more preferable resolution.

I use a tool called Image Resizer for Windows. Download this here:

In checking the size of a photo from my iPhone, we can see here that the default size is 3264x2448 and the image is over 2MB:



Use Ctrl+A to select all of the photos in your folder.

Right click your mouse and you will see an option named 'Resize pictures'. Select that.

You will be presented with this dialog box:



I have changed the settings above to be what I want them to be. Medium is a good size for forums.

NB: Tick the 'Replace the originals' option! This makes life much simpler when you come to rename the images.

If you right click the image now and select Properties and then Details, you will see the images have been resized downwards:



Fantastic, you have now resized all of your pictures!

3. Bulk Rename

When it comes to grabbing the links, it's really great to rename your images and have a better flowing naming convention. 

For this, I use a tool call 'Bulk Rename Utility'. Download this here:

Once you run this tool, you will see this dialog box:



This box looks complicated but DO NOT PANIC, this is a very simple change to make.

Navigate to the folder you created earlier within dropbox.

We are interested in two boxes. RegEx (1) and also Numbering (10).

We are now looking at this:



We are wanting to focus on an element of the name of every picture, in order to change it to something else. Looking at the above, we can see that the word 'Photo' is present in each, so we will use this as our 'Match' term within the RegEx (1) field. I want to change my images to be called 'renamed', so I will use this term in the 'Replace' field. Names must be exact, check your capital letters.

We can't have every picture simply named 'renamed' though, as they can't all have the same name, so we will now add an incrementing number to the end of that.

We will use the 'Numbering (10) element for this. As we want to add the number to the end, open the 'Mode' dropdown and select 'Suffix'. The default is to start at 1 and increment by 1, we will leave this as it is.

You now need to use your shift click to select all of your photos, you will notice that the 'New Name' column will show you a preview of what your files are about to be renamed to. Your dialog box should now look like this:




Once you are happy, click the 'Rename' button in the bottom right corner. You will see a confirmation dialog telling you the amount of photos that will be renamed, click OK to continue.

Well done, your photos have now been bulk renamed!

4. Bulk 'Get Links'

Each of your images has a 'public link', this is something that would allow your photo to be seen across the web. Normally, you would right click each image and obtain the public link to paste into the forum. This part of our process will grab the links for all of your images in one easy step!

For this, we will use a tool called 'Dropbox Linker'. Download this here:

You will need to hook this tool up to your dropbox user id. There is a little option below the user id field called 'where can I get it?' If you don't know your user id, this will tell you how to get it. Set the folder location to the folder we created which stores your images.

Run the tool and you will see this dialog box (it will contain your user id).



You should see a little icon in your bottom right toolbar, hover over it and it is called 'Dropbox Linker. Right click and select 'Get Links'.

You will now see a dialog box that shows all of the files in your selected folder. Drag the slider to the far left to show 'All items'. Select the images you wish to use and then click 'Get links!'.



The folder above is a different one, hence why it does not list the files we renamed earlier. This is just for demo purposes.

Once you've clicked 'Get links!', you can now move onto the next stage!

5. Append Links with IMG tags

You now have all of your image links on your clipboard. You now need to get these ready for the forum, so that they show as images rather than links. To do this, we need to append the image tags to the links.

First thing to do, download a proper text editor, we will use Notepad++.

Open Notepad++ and use Edit then Paste (or Ctrl+V) to paste your links in. You will now see this:




As we said, you now need to add the tags to ensure your images display on the forum as images rather than links. To do this, we use something known as a 'Regular Expression'. We actually did this earlier too, remember the RegEx fields from the bulk renamer?

We need to use the Search/Rename function or you can use Ctrl+H.

First thing to do is change the 'Search Mode' to be 'Regular expression'.

In the same way as we did earlier with the bulk rename, we are going to change 'something' to 'something else'.

See this screenshot for what we will firstly do:



We will add our first tag by changing 'https' and adding the IMG tag in front inside [] brackets.

Now we add our closing tag, like this:



We have changed 'jpg' and added the closing /IMG tag inside [] brackets also. Click 'Replace All'.

Now we have our links which are ready to go into the forum. They should look like this:



A little tip for you before moving on. If you have more than 10 photos, you will need to do a little bit of shuffling of your links. For example, with your numbering, you would not see this:

image1, image2, image3, image 4 etc....

You would see this:

image1, image10, image11, image12, image13 etc.

It is quick and easy to go and cut/paste links 2-9 into their rightful places and then the same for links 11-19. Everything from there will flow perfectly.

6. Add to NPOC

For your final step, simple copy your finished links into your chosen NPOC thread. You can hit the preview button just to ensure they display correctly and then add to your post!

Now stand back and admire your work!


Guide by Stevie-Boy 2015
2023 Tesla Model 3 Performance
Member of the Month: Jan 2014
ex P11 Si, P11 GT, P11-144 Sport+, P11 GT Turbo, P11-144 Wagon, Subaru Legacy B4 RSK, 350z, Type R
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