Shrinking Media With The Help Of Emacs

Sun, Jul 30, 2023

Often I find myself refining my collection of photos and family videos, usually with the following process:

• removing media clutter
• removing any duplicates
• tagging as necessary
• compressing where reasonable
• renaming to a more denote format

Emacs and the associated muscle memory greatly helps with this process.

Firstly though I leverage other applications, for example, duplicate removal and tagging takes place through digikam, media clutter through thunar and gthumb

My emacs process is then:

• open media directory in dired

• sort by size using C-u s S - the big S is setting the ls format by size

• M-< (beginning-of-buffer) - so I can see the largest files

• if I want to squish a video I will probably want to preview it first in mpv, so I do this asynchronously using & (dired-do-async-shell-command) and relying on my defined dired-guess-shell-alist-user setup and then selecting i (mpv shortcut) to have a quick peek at the original dimensions. Typically if the video is 1920x1080 then I like to halve the dimensions which when running through ffmpeg saves about 80-90% on disk space.

  I have my own ffmpeg bash scripts which I call through dwim-shell-command so a command search for something like dw sh my/dwim-video-shrink will dired execute the file under cursor or over a list of marked files.

• for images I again use dwim-shell-command with a quick command search for something like dw cr my/dwim-picture-crush which isn’t always as brutal as it might suggest but a script that I regularly modify when compressing images, setting the compression parameters appropriately.

  If I need to quickly inspect the image then I could open it in emacs but I prefer again to open in gthumb using &

• Possibly at the end of a directory compress I might check the directory size by ? in dired which I have mapped to an elisp my/get-file-size function that runs the async-shell-command du -

• and of course my files can be easily renamed through wdired

As I am using a tiling window manager all of this can be accomplished keyboard only and on a single screen!