u/igotnolifelemons

I wont make this a long post but I hope we find a few people who love techno in Surrey!

My friend is an upcoming Techno DJ, we actually do live streams on social media and have built out a decent following in the Techno space.

Trying to find a venue we came across The Miners Arms in Mytchett - we actually live closer to London (Around Walton-on-Thames, Sunbury) and thought this was the perfect place to host a techno event because of the light up dance floor!

It's from 6pm till 12pm on a Saturday night, as the resident dad-dancer I'm hoping someone can take that crown away from me! We're a welcoming bunch and want to get locals into our music!

It will be our first actual event so we're excited and hoping we can fill the space and if it goes well we'll be taking it all around Surrey as we find venues!

Link to the software: https://scalir.shad.digital/

Feel free to use the online version, or self-host using the instructions. There's an unsigned (for now) Windows version, and a Linux version which is untested.

So the story starts something like this:

A client sends me 400+ images to add to their gallery on a WordPress website. They don't want me to crop the images, that's fine, but now I have around 1.2gb worth of raw photos...

The Old Way:

I'd either use batch processing in Photoshop to resave them as JPG and reduce the file size - takes a while due to Photoshop opening files, then saving, then moving to the next.

Or I'd add them to a canva doc and save them...which takes a long time...renaming each page, doesn't take into account the original aspect ratio of the image, so I ended up making multiple files.

There's also Smush, or other server-side tools you can use on-site, however I feel that WordPress is better with less plugins to run tasks like this.

Then there's online image optimisers, sure there's some good ones out there - but again, you can hit limits, either time based or you can't upload more than 25 images at a time...or there's the issue of having to sign up for an account...

What I built:

Scalir - FREE and OPEN SOURCE Image Optimiser

The idea was simple, create a tool that lets me select a folder or drag and drop as many files as I need to optimise. Run the task locally - i.e. no uploading, it just uses a web interface for simplicity and frameworks that already exist to process things, but once you've installed it it doesn't actually connect to the internet for the processing side..

Give some options for target file size and target resize (I choose 2000px across the longest edge, and under 1mb)

Click optimise, save files to zip or save to a different folder.

I then thought, what if I made this a desktop app - works great on Windows (not yet signed), haven't tested on Linux (need to pull out the old linux laptop) and can't be built on MacOS yet as I need an Apple Developer License.

What it did for me:

What would have been a grueling 5-6 hours of manual labour, or a slow processing batch on photoshop for the next 2 hours, became about 10 minutes of work. It took me about 3-4 hours to build this, and I know there are existing tools but it feels nice to have built my own tool.

I want this to be a free tool, I don't like paying for software when I don't have to - so feel free to use it if it's helpful for you too - and if there's anything you feel it's missing let me know!