Something I do very often is resizing images. I wrote about it before, and for a long time I’ve settled on a custom bash script.

I’ve recently found a somewhat better option: integrating a button in Nautilus, the Ubuntu file explorer.

Possible but nope

There a many ways to integrate custom code inside Nautilus in order to extend it. For example:

• writing a custom C program. Example. That’s the historic way to write plugins, but the thing is: it’s hard to write and maintain C. I have experience with that 10+ years ago, and I don’t want to relearn old stuff.
• writing the same program in Rust. Example. A bit better for me, better dependency management but the ecosystem is fragile and I fear that the <1.0.0 libs will break and force me to spend time fixing library stuff when I update my system.
• a nautilus shell script. The low tech solution I’ll settle on for now.

Nautilus

Nautilus proposes a simple way to create scripts on files:

• it exposes a NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS environment variable that contain the list of selected files
• you can write a executable script and store it in ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts

This way, you can write an executable file in whatever language you like (bash, python, rust…) in order to perform tasks on said files.

Our script

Save this as resize-image.py, make it executable (chmod +x resize-image.py) and copy it to ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts. You can now select a few image files in Nautilus, right click on them -> scripts -> resize image.

#! /usr/bin/env python3

# resize an image to 25% of its original size, and store the result in
# the `small` subdirectory
# select the image files you want to resize, right click, and under Script
# choose resize-image

import os
import subprocess

def new_filename(filewithpath, subdirectory='small'):
    directory = os.path.dirname(filewithpath)
    filename = os.path.basename(filewithpath)
    target_directory = os.path.join(directory, subdirectory)
    try:
        os.mkdir(target_directory)
    except FileExistsError as e:
        # The directory already exists and yes, this exception is poorly named
        pass
    target_filename = os.path.join(target_directory, filename)
    return target_filename



def main():
    for filepath in os.getenv('NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS', '').splitlines():
        small_filename = new_filename(filepath)
        subprocess.run(["convert", "-resize", "25%", filepath, small_filename])



if __name__ == '__main__':
    # alternatively you can test this script by hand by setting the env var yourself:
    # export NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS='/home/some/full/path/test.png'; python resize-image.py 
    main()

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