Bring out the GIMP - Image processing question

TetraNitroCubane

I've recently found myself in a situation where I need to manipulate multiple image files in a specific way, and save them in a particular format. In the way of background, I'm running all of this on an OS X 10.6.2 machine. Unfortunately, Photoshop isn't available to me, so I've been forced to use GIMP. GIMP performs admirably to do these operations on a single file, but the issue is that I have a massive load of files to transform, and GIMP isn't so straightforward to me when it comes to automation.

Basically, here's what I need to do:

1 - Open a PDF file at 600 DPI (opening at other resolutions makes it look nasty)
2 - Flatten the image
3 - Rotate the image 180 Degrees
4 - Crop the image to specific dimensions at a specific offset
5 - Save the resulting image as a PNG file

I've been poking about online, but the scripting language that GIMP seems to leverage for these purposes is thick as soup to me, and I'm really not in a position to learn it right now. The OS X automator doesn't play nice with GIMP, either. It refuses to recognize GIMP as even existing when I try to record, and then crashes. I've also tried Imagemagic, but it's convoluted installation process dropped something like 20 other programs/packages on my machine and mucked it up, so I uninstalled it.

Does anyone know how I can use this program to streamline this workflow? Or, barring that, does anyone know of any other program that might be used for this purpose? I"m rather an idiot when it comes to this stuff, I realize, but I'm just looking for the simplest option available. Thanks a ton.

virgilsamms

Check out Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/), File -> Batch Conversion/Rename -> Use advanced options, it is a batch image conversion tool that is reasonably powerful. From looking at the options it gives you can do almost everything you need to.

Legionnaired

Since you're on OSX, also check out imagemagick. It's an OSS solution that's made to process images on the command line.

I think the following command does what you want:

convert *.pdf -set filename:outname '%f' -rotate 180 -region '100x200+10+10' '%[filename:outname].png'

Just replace the region offsets.