Photos from modern digital cameras are generally so large these days that you have to shrink them to use them in a document. I do this a lot, so I automated it.

The foto4lb.py script shrinks the files it is given to a width of 886 pixels, and shrinks the height by the same factor. It uses ImageMagick with the py-wand binding. The name is a Dutch abbreviation of ‘photo for logbook’, which is what I most often use this script for. :-)

This particular width was chosen to be able to fit two photos side-by-side in the text block of my LaTeX-formatted logbook. You can change this width using the -w option.

To speed up the processing of multiple pictures, this script runs the conversions in parallel on all the cores that your machine has.