More below, but mainly I wonder how people here do downsizing of JPEG images for the web, so I'm putting this question up front: Can any of you do better downsizing than this, and if so how?... http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/pics/20080701_Adriana/comparison/ The filenames reveal which program was used to downsize and to what width. Use the "original.jpg" with your system and see how it looks, but if yours looks better, make sure the downsized file is about the same number of bytes as mine, or smaller. --Mike --- For years I've been using an "action" I made in Photoshop to make smaller versions of my large JPEG photos. For every JPEG file in a directory, the action would make a JPEG 640 pixels wide and another 320 pixels wide (maintaining aspect ratio). It had to put them in the same fixed location so I had another script to move them to where I wanted them. Now, finally, I tried ImageMagick' "convert" program on an Ubuntu machine. It didn't take too long to figure out how it worked. The first few downsized files I made were vastly superior to what I was getting from Photoshop, but then I realized that my file sizes were larger -- more than double the size of the Photoshop files. So I read a little more about convert's -strip and -quality options and I titrated -quality so that I was getting the same filesize as Photoshop was producing. These are the commands I was then using for 320 and 640 pixel wide images: convert infile.jpg -strip -quality 80 -resize 320 -filter Lanczos -sharpen 0x0.7 outfile.jpg convert infile.jpg -strip -quality 80 -resize 640 -filter Lanczos -sharpen 0x0.7 outfile.jpg Here is an example of ImageMagick and Photoshop downsized output files along with the original: http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/pics/20080701_Adriana/comparison/ If you can do better, let me know because I will love to see your output files and your method (just make sure your output file size is almost the same as mine). Now that the files were the same size, I still liked the ImageMagick files better than the Photoshop files! That was a nice surprise. The truth may be that Photoshop is better at this but I wasn't doing everything I could to optimize its output. The reason is I didn't try harder is that it is a pain to work with the Photoshop "actions" -- I don't want to mess with them. ImageMagick uses command-line arguments instead of "actions" so it is a piece of cake to make changes to settings. This also makes it easy to do scripting. Here's what I'll be doing in bash: mkdir 640 320 for file in $(\ls -1 *.jpg) ; do for N in 640 320 ; do convert $file -strip -quality 80 -resize ${N} -filter Lanczos -sharpen 0x0.7 ${N}/$file done done By the way, I got some of my ideas from here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/main/foto/down_sample/example1.htm But that guy used Photoshop to "sharpen" his ImageMagick output file, which seems like cheating to me, or at least it confuses readers who want to compare the programs. Maybe ImageMagick didn't have -sharpen back in 2004 when he made that page. Best, Mike