For an upcoming family event my wife scanned several hundred photos with the intent of creating a DVD slideshow to show at a gathering. Since I haven’t figured out the scanner problem yet she scanned everything on Windows. Since that is done I’m now taking over on Ubuntu.
I’m tracking the process as I do it. Perhaps some folks will have suggestions.
I did a little research and discovered dvd-slideshow. Unless I hear a better suggestion I intend to use this to create the slideshow. Apt-get had no trouble installing dvd-slideshow which is one reason I’m confident this will work. The first snag is that all of the pictures are in bmp format which is not on the list of supported formats.
I’ve made a copy of all the images (since I don’t want to mess with the originals – this took her many hours) and now need to convert them from bmp to png. I looked around for a while on Google searching for variants of “mass image file conversion”. Eventually I started honing in on The GIMP (already installed) but it’s manual did not include any info on mass conversion.
Finally I opened upgThumb Image Viewer and low-and-behold it already handles mass conversion and it supports bmp to png.
I’m going to spend a little time researching the dvd-slideshow script format to figure out if I want to write a shell or ruby script to create the input script or if I want to use one of the existing solutions. My inner-geek already knows the answer. 
May 16, 2007 at 4:13 am
There’s a nifty little command that you could use to do the conversion for you.
convert *.bmp *.png
This will convert (not overwrite) the files in the current folder from bmp to png. Iirc if you simply change the extension from .bmp to .png the file will actually be converted.
Good luck!
May 16, 2007 at 8:51 am
For the mass conversion you could of course also use imageMagick. See for example this page:
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php
It is also just a sudo aptitude install imagemagick away…
Good luck!
May 16, 2007 at 10:02 am
You could also use the convert application from Imagemagick to convert the pictures en masse using a simple shellscript.
May 17, 2007 at 9:37 am
The other one that can make pictures into a slideshow is Avidemux
May 17, 2007 at 9:44 am
Wanted to add: http://linuxappfinder.com/package/slcreator
Slideshow Creator seems to tie in as a GUI frontend ot dvd slideshow, which should work well for you. They have .debs available.
May 17, 2007 at 7:12 pm
“convert *.bmp *.png” wont work because the “*” is a wild card and the name of the image to be converted is not stored in “*” like a variable.
Try this instead:
cd ./photos
for pic in *.bmp
do
convert ${pic} ${pic}.png
done
Translation:
cd to where the photo are
for all the items in this list (*.bmp)
do
some task on the items
done
All the photos will be converted from “photo.jpg” to “photo.jpg.png”.
-GZ
May 18, 2007 at 1:21 am
Knew I should have tested that command before posting it – thanks for the clarification!
May 23, 2007 at 10:49 am
[...] 23rd, 2007 After last time I ended up using dir2slideshow to create the basic script. It worked well except that the [...]