Reduce Bandwidth By Shrinking Images

Published on Jan. 24, 2010

My girlfriend's brother has a simple WordPress-based website that I set up for him a few year ago - and he likes to post a lot of images. For various reasons I have it hosted on my VPS in Australia, which only comes with 15GB of bandwidth, most likely because I got a crazy good deal on it.

The problem is, that isn't much bandwidth. Each page of his site was previously using almost 10MB of bandwidth per view - which meant the 15GB was running out. I deduced the high usage in Firebug and noticed it was *gasp* from large images, some almost 1MB large. The images on the server are contained in subdirectories under a gallery folder - and I wanted to resize them. What I actually wanted to do was:

1) If the image was over 1024x900, resize it.
2) If the image size (bytes) was over X, lower the quality.

I ended up using ImageMagick, which is what first obviously came to mind for image manipulation. While there is likely a better way to resize all the images, this is what I came up with. Maybe somebody else will find it useful too.

for dir in /home/vhosts/website.com/html/wp-content/gallery/*
do
  cd $dir
  for filename in *.jpg
  do
    echo Filename: "$filename"
    width=`identify -ping -format %w "$filename"`
    height=`identify -ping -format %h "$filename"`
    if [ $width -ge 1024 -a $height -ge 900 ]; then
      convert "$filename" -resize "%80>" "$filename"
      echo New Dimensions: $width x $height 
    fi
    filesize=`stat -c%s "$filename"`
    if [ $filesize -ge 414981 ]; then
      convert "$filename" -quality 90 "$filename"
      echo Old Filesize: $filesize
      echo New Filesize: `stat -c%s "$filename"`
    fi
  done
done

Save it as "resize.sh" and run it with "bash resize.sh". The output:

Filename: img_5364.jpg
Old Filesize: 950748
New Filesize: 331426
Filename: img_5366.jpg
Filename: img_5367.jpg
Filename: 1c10_1.jpg
Filename: 1.jpg
Filename: 2752_1.jpg
Filename: 42920014.jpg
New Dimensions: 1544 x 1024
Filename: 42920017.jpg
New Dimensions: 1544 x 1024

Tagged as: bash | imagemagick | traffic

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