Using XnConvert for Windows, macOS, and Linux

- A popular batch conversion tool is XnConvert. Now, this tool is technically free to use if you are an individual or a nonprofit. If you are a company, they do ask that you license the product, but it is a very reasonable cost. So if you're using this for your own personal use or as a nonprofit organization, it costs you nothing. If you're an individual, it's a small fee. It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it's a very powerful batch processor. Let's go ahead and launch it here and it has a nice guided workflow. What I like is you just work your way across from left to right. To start, we need to add some files. We can either add individual files and select them, or an entire folder. Let's go here to the exercise files and we'll just select Batch 01 here, choose all the images inside, Shift + Click if I want. You'll notice here that we can actually control that a little bit more and even narrow it down by types of files. So if you have a folder that has a whole bunch of images, you can select. Also, if you can't tell from this extensive list of file formats, this is one of the broadest most compatible image editors out there. It can read far more than tools like Adobe Photoshop. You choose Open and all the images load in. Here, we have a mixture of raw files and JPEG files in the same folder. You could choose to view this as a list if that's easier to see the information, or easily browse visual thumbnails. Next, we have Actions. Actions allow you to do much more than just convert the file type. We can resize, add watermarks, apply filters. It's an entire batch processor. Let's take a look here at the previous actions. I'm going to clear those out and we'll take a look at the before state. Now I'm going to add some actions. First, we're going to take a look here and I want to do a simple resize. So I'm going to tell this that I want it to resize for the web and to be 1200 pixels wide and 1200 pixels tall, but preserve the aspect ratio. Preserving the aspect ratio means that it won't stretch the photo or crop it. So if it's a landscape photo, it's going to be 1200 pixels wide. If it's a portrait orientation, it's going to be 1200 pixels tall. This works nicely so it doesn't distort the images, but it does let you set a cap. You'll notice that we can choose other options here, whether or not it allows it to enlarge or only shrink. This will allow the image to get bigger if you need to make them consistent. I'll click here and just roll that up and add another action. You'll see that we have a lot of options here such as the ability to add text. So if I wanted to, I could say review copy and we could position that as well as adjust its relative position. We can continue to add other options here and you'll see that there are creative filters. There's the ability to enhance edges or detail. For example, I could do a little bit of focus restoration. This will make sure that the image is nice and sharp. We could choose to add a watermark, selecting something like a logo file and tell it to place that in the lower right corner. Next, I go to output. This allows me to see where it's going to write the files. Let's choose that convert folder we made earlier and I'll make a new folder there, Batch 2 and choose it. Notice we can append the filename or make other changes here. Tell it to preserve the folder structure if there's nested folders and whether or not to keep the current metadata. When you're all done, you can see the settings here and then simply click Convert. It now batch processes through the images. Once you're all done, you can simply navigate to the targeted folder and you'll see that it did exactly what we told it. It added the watermark and the text overlay. This worked nicely so that we were able to watermark our photos as well as do the batch resize and other process. If you're looking for a image converter that's very robust and supports a record number of file type conversions, this one's really it. And what's nice about it is it's one of the few tools that's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.