Irfanview to proportionally resize all covers

[AMF]

My library currently has just over 5,000 books in it. I never really worried about the cover sizes, until I noticed one specific book's cover was over 2Mb and the book itself was only 440kb. I realized I'm wasting an enormous amount of space on my Dropbox and backup drive. I used Irfanview to proportionally resize all covers so the long side is a maximum of 500 pixels long.

The whole exercise took less than a minute!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by AMF

My library currently has just over 5,000 books in it. I never really worried about the cover sizes, until I noticed one specific book's cover was over 2Mb and the book itself was only 440kb. I realized I'm wasting an enormous amount of space on my Dropbox and backup drive. I used Irfanview to proportionally resize all covers so the long side is a maximum of 500 pixels long.

The whole exercise took less than a minute!

Are the covers also embedded in your ebooks?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by AMF

My library currently has just over 5,000 books in it. I never really worried about the cover sizes, until I noticed one specific book's cover was over 2Mb and the book itself was only 440kb. I realized I'm wasting an enormous amount of space on my Dropbox and backup drive. I used Irfanview to proportionally resize all covers so the long side is a maximum of 500 pixels long.

The whole exercise took less than a minute!

Get the Resize Cover Plugin, That takes care of THE LIBRARY (GUI)
After that has been done: do as DNSB suggests: Embed so the book shrinks

Quality check Plugin to FIND which covers in the LIBRARY are big (does not check the book files. Embed after fixing)

[AMF]

Originally Posted by theducks

Get the Resize Cover Plugin, That takes care of THE LIBRARY (GUI)
After that has been done: do as DNSB suggests: Embed so the book shrinks

Quality check Plugin to FIND which covers in the LIBRARY are big (does not check the book files. Embed after fixing)

It sounds like a lot of effort to achieve the same result. I literally used Irfanview to automatically resize all covers' longest side to 500 pixels if they were longer than that. I only looked at the biggest cover (size) and it was 3120 pixels high - that was enough reason to do the resize exercise.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by AMF

It sounds like a lot of effort to achieve the same result. I literally used Irfanview to automatically resize all covers' longest side to 500 pixels if they were longer than that. I only looked at the biggest cover (size) and it was 3120 pixels high - that was enough reason to do the resize exercise.

You probably aren't achieving the same result. It sounds like you are resizing the cover.jpg in each book directory in calibre. This image is then embedded into the actual books at different points. If you resize the cover.jpg after the book has been updated, you won't be resizing the embedded version and have to do that again.

Also, but using an external tool to manipulate the calibre library, there is a higher chance of breakage. And it means that people need to learn how to use the tool to achieve the desired affect.

But, if you want the small cover size, I would think the simplest thing to do is use calibre to set the maximum size of the cover. There is a tweak in the calibre preferences to do this. When it is set, all large covers will be downscaled to this size when the book is added or the cover updated.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by AMF

I used Irfanview to proportionally resize all covers so the long side is a maximum of 500 pixels long.

Good info and thanks for sharing what worked for you.

Moderator Notice
Since it had nothing to do with the Resize Cover plugin I moved it to its own thread.