Byte Size Tips: How to Compress a Folder of Images Easily from the Command Line

If you’re dealing with a large number of images, you really don’t want to have to open each one in a photo editor and then save it out as an optimized web file. It’s much easier to do it in bulk, and if you are a keyboard ninja, you can do it easily with a single line.

If you are running Linux or Mac OS X, the bash shell makes it really easy to perform operations on more than one file at a time. If you are running Windows, we’d recommend installing Cygwin — and during the install process, pick the ImageMagick package. Otherwise you’ll have to download and install that separately. For Linux or Mac, you’ll want to install ImageMagick, which is pretty easy.

Now that you have that out of the way, you need to open a terminal window already set to the folder of images you want to manipulate. For cygwin, you’ll probably need to use the cd command and switch to the /cygdrive/c/ folder, like this:

cd /cygdrive/c/

by The Geek via How-To Geek