adding text to JPEGs, in bulk

[jdow]

From: "François Patte" <francois.patte at math-info.univ-paris5.fr>
> Amadeus W. M. a écrit :
>> On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 02:22:20 +0930, Tim wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>Is there an easy way to add some text to a collection of JPEGs?  For
>>>instance, I'd like to stamp the words "PROOF" across a collection of
>>>JPEGs I'm showing someone to pick out which ones they'll buy copies of,
>>>showing them a full sized, full quality, version of the images, but ones
>>>that they can't just nick.  I really don't want to have to hand modify
>>>each image in turn, there's about 300 of them.
>>>
>>>-- 
>>>(Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.)
>>>
>>>Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
>>>I read messages from the public lists.
>>
>>
>> This is what you do:
>>
>> 1) The "convert" program from ImageMagick can do all sorts of
>> image transformations, including writing text on top of an image.
>> I don't know the syntax off the top of my head, so you'll have to
>> look that up. A simple
>>
>> convert -h
>>
>> will show you what it can do. You want to look at the -draw
>> primitive. Better yet, look here:
>>
>> http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php
>>
>> For instance
>>
>> convert -fill red -font Bookman-DemiItalic -pointsize 32 -draw "text 30,30 TEST" 
>> input.jpg output.jpg
>>
>>
>>
>> 2) Once you're happy with the results, do all jpgs in a for loop:
>>
>> for file in *.jpg
>> do
>> outputname=`basename $file .jpg`_out.jpg
>> convert [drawing command] $file $outputname
>> done
>>
>> You can do this directly at the prompt, or you can save it in
>> a bash script.
>>
>> Command line comes in pretty handy, doesn't it?
>
> All these answers about adding comment text to jpeg are interresting but
> the result is "binary". I have been seeking for a while (and did not
> find an answer) on how to annotate an image with a "grep readable"
> annotation. If I use Gimp or ImageMagick, to write the comment "foo" in
> an image, grep foo image.jpg returns "binary file image.jpg matches".
>
> Is there a way to add a comment in ascii characters in an image? And to
> be able to use grep to find the images with a particular string in it?
>
> To be more clear: I am working with image of manuscripts and I want to
> able to add a commentary to each image like "in this image the subjet is
> ..." Then I could use grep to find out what are the images which contain
> a particular subject.
>
> There is some tool like this with gThumb, but the commentaries are in
> separates files, written in xml (cannot use grep!) and this is quite
> tricky to maintain a synchronisation between several computers (using
> rsync for instance).

You may have to go to TIFF or something similar to get that
functionality.

{^_^}