Posts Tagged ‘images’

SEO: Best day and time to write new articles and tweet to get more blog reads – Social Network Timing

Tuesday, June 17th, 2014

what-is-best-time-to-write-articles-to-increase-your-blog-traffic

I'm trying to regularly blog – as this gives me a roadmap what I'm into and how I spent my time. When have free time,  I blog almost daily except on weekends (as in weekends I'm trying to stay away from computers). So if you want to attract more readers to your blog the interesting question arises
 

What time is best to hit publish on your posts?

writing-in-the-mogning-on-the-internet-timing-morning-is-best-for-your-posts
Now there are different angles from where you can extract conclusions on best timing to blog post.One major thing to consider always when posting is that highest percentage of users read blogs in the morning with their morning coffee. Here are some more facts on when web content is more red:

  • 70% of users say they read blogs in the morning
  • More men read blogs at night than woman
  • Mondays are the highest traffic days for avarage blogs
  • 11 a.m. is normally the highest traffic hour for blogs
  • Usually most comments are put on Saturdays
  • Blogs with more than one post a day has higher chance of inbound links and usually get more unique visitors

As my blog is more technical oriented most of my visitors are men and therefore posting my blogs at night doesn't interfere much with my readers.
However, I've noticed that for me personally posting in time interval from 13:00 to 17:00 influence positively the amount of unique visitors the blog gets.

According to research done by Social Fresh – Thursday is the best day to publish an article if you want to get more Social SharesBest-Day-to-Blog-to-get-more-shares-in-social-networks

As a rule of thumb Thursday wins 10% more shares than all other days. In fact, 31% of the top 100 social share days in 2011 fell on Thursday.
My logical explanation on this phenomenon is that people tend to be more and more bored from their work and try to entertain more and more as the week progresses.

To get more attention on what I'm writting I use a bit of social networking but I prefer using only a micro blogging social networking.  I use Twitter to share what I'm into. When I write a new article on my blog I tweet its title with a link to my article, because this drives people attention to what I have to say.

In overall I am skeptical about social siting like Facebook and MySpace because it has negative impact on how people use their time and especially negative on youngsters Other reason why I don't like Friends Networks is because sharing what you have to say on sites like FB, Google+ or "The Russian Facebook" –  Vkontekte VK.com are not respecting privacy of your data.

 

You write free fresh content for their website for free and you get nothing!

 

Moreover by daily posting latest buzz you read / watched on Facebook etc. or simply saying what's happening with you, where you're situated now etc., you slowly get addicted to posting – yes for good or bad people tend to be maniacal).

By placing all of your pesronal or impersonal stuff online, you're making these sites better index their sites into Google / Yahoo / Yandex search engines and therefore making them profitable and high ranked websites on the internet and giving out your personal time for Facebook profit? + you loose control over your data (your data is not physically on your side but situated on some remote server, somewhere on the internet).
 

Best avarage time to post on Tweet Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin

best-time-and-day-to-write-new-articles-schedule-content-at-the-right-time-on-social-media-to-get-high-trafficrank

So What is Best Day timing to Post, Pin or Tweet?

Below is an infographic I fond on this blog (visual data is originalcompiled by SurePayRoll) and showing visualized results from some extensive research on the topic.

best-time-to-post-and-tweet-blog-articles-social-media-infographic


Here is most important facts this infographic reveals:


The avarage best time to post tweet and pin your new articles is about 15:00 h
 

  • Best timing to post on Twitter is on Mondays to Thursdays from 13:00 to 15:00 h
  • Best timing to post on facebook is between 13:00 and 16:00 h
  • For Linkedin it is best to place your publish between Tuesdays to Thursdays


Peak times on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin

  • Peak times for use of Facebook is on Wednesdays about 15:00 h
  • Peak times for use of Twitter is from Monday to Thursdays from 9:00  to 15:00 h
  • Linkedin Peak time is from 17:00 to 18:00 h
  • Including images to your articles increases traffic, tweets with images increase visits, favorites and leads


Worst time (when users will probably not view your content) on FB, Twitter and Linkedin

  • Weekends before 08:00  and after 20:00 h
  • Everyday after 20:00 and Fridays after 15:00 noon
  • Mondays and Fridays from 22:00 to 06:00 morning

Facts about Google+
 

  • Google+ is the fastest growing demographic social network for people aged 45 to 54
  • Best time to share your posts on Google+ is from 09:00 to 10:00 in the morning
  • Including images to your articles increases traffic, tweets with images increase visits, favorites and leads
     

Images generate more traffic and engagement

  • Including images to your articles increases traffic, tweets with images increase visits, favorites and leads


I'm aware as every research above info on best time to tweet and post is just a generalization and according to field of information posted suggested time could be different from optiomal time for individual writer, however as a general direction, info is very useful and it gives you some idea.
Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends according to Dan Zarrella’s research. Tweets posted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday had higher CTR (Click Through Rate) than those posted in the rest of the week.

tweet-on-the-weekends-is-better-for-high-click-through-rate

Other best day to tweet other than weekends is mid-week time Wednesday.
Whether your site or blog is using retweet to generate more traffic to website best time to retweet is said to be around 5 pm. CTR is higher

Optimize PNG images by compressing on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD server to Improve Website overall Performance

Monday, November 27th, 2017

how-to-optimize-your-png-pictures-to-reduce-size-and-save-speed-bandwidth-optipng-compression-tests-results

If you own a website with some few hundreds of .PNG images like 10 000 / 15 000 png images and the website shows to perform slow in Google PageSpeed Insights and is slow to open when Google Searched or Shared on Facebook / Twitter etc. then one recommended step to boost up the website opening speed is to compress (optimize) the .PNG pictures without loosing the images quality to both save space and account bandwidth you could use optipng even though this is not the only tool available to help you optimize and reduce the size of your images, some few other tools you might like to check out if you have more time are:

 a.)  pngcrush – optimizes PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files.
 b.)  pngnq – tool for optimizing PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images. It is a tool for quantizing PNG images in RGBA format.
 c.)  pngquant – PNG (Portable Network Graphics) image optimising utility. It is a command-line utility for converting 24/32-bit PNG images to paletted (8-bit) PNGs.
 

1. Install and Compress / optimize PNG / GIF / PNM / TIFF file format with optipng
 

OPTIPING tool recompresses the .PNG images to a smaller size without loosing any quality information, besides PNG file format it also supports (BMP, GIF, PNM and TIFF) image format.

If you don't have optipng installed on your server you can;

a.) install it on Redhat RPM based Linux distributions lets say CentOS Linux use:

 

[root@centos: ~]# yum install epel-release
[root@centos: ~]# yum install optipng

Note that, You will need to  first enable epel repo on centos 7

 

b.) If instead you're on a Debian GNU / Linux

debian:~# apt-get install optipng


c.) FreeBSD users can install it from FreeBSD ports with:

 

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/graphics/optipng
freebsd# make install clean

optipng syntax is quite self explanatory
optipng [options] what-ever-file.png


You can get a full list of possible command options with -? command, here is a list:

 

debian:~# optipng -?
Synopsis:
    optipng [options] files …
Files:
    Image files of type: PNG, BMP, GIF, PNM or TIFF
Basic options:
    -?, -h, -help    show this help
    -o <level>        optimization level (0-7)        [default: 2]
    -v            run in verbose mode / show copyright and version info
General options:
    -backup, -keep    keep a backup of the modified files
    -clobber        overwrite existing files
    -fix        enable error recovery
    -force        enforce writing of a new output file
    -preserve        preserve file attributes if possible
    -quiet, -silent    run in quiet mode
    -simulate        run in simulation mode
    -out <file>        write output file to <file>
    -dir <directory>    write output file(s) to <directory>
    -log <file>        log messages to <file>
    —            stop option switch parsing
Optimization options:
    -f <filters>    PNG delta filters (0-5)            [default: 0,5]
    -i <type>        PNG interlace type (0-1)
    -zc <levels>    zlib compression levels (1-9)        [default: 9]
    -zm <levels>    zlib memory levels (1-9)        [default: 8]
    -zs <strategies>    zlib compression strategies (0-3)    [default: 0-3]
    -zw <size>        zlib window size (256,512,1k,2k,4k,8k,16k,32k)
    -full        produce a full report on IDAT (might reduce speed)
    -nb            no bit depth reduction
    -nc            no color type reduction
    -np            no palette reduction
    -nx            no reductions
    -nz            no IDAT recoding
Editing options:
    -snip        cut one image out of multi-image or animation files
    -strip <objects>    strip metadata objects (e.g. "all")
Optimization levels:
    -o0        <=>    -o1 -nx -nz                (0 or 1 trials)
    -o1        <=>    -zc9 -zm8 -zs0 -f0            (1 trial)
            (or…)    -zc9 -zm8 -zs1 -f5            (1 trial)
    -o2        <=>    -zc9 -zm8 -zs0-3 -f0,5            (8 trials)
    -o3        <=>    -zc9 -zm8-9 -zs0-3 -f0,5        (16 trials)
    -o4        <=>    -zc9 -zm8 -zs0-3 -f0-5            (24 trials)
    -o5        <=>    -zc9 -zm8-9 -zs0-3 -f0-5        (48 trials)
    -o6        <=>    -zc1-9 -zm8 -zs0-3 -f0-5        (120 trials)
    -o7        <=>    -zc1-9 -zm8-9 -zs0-3 -f0-5        (240 trials)
    -o7 -zm1-9    <=>    -zc1-9 -zm1-9 -zs0-3 -f0-5        (1080 trials)
Notes:
    The combination for -o1 is chosen heuristically.
    Exhaustive combinations such as "-o7 -zm1-9" are not generally recommended.
Examples:
    optipng file.png                        (default speed)
    optipng -o5 file.png                    (slow)
    optipng -o7 file.png                    (very slow)

Just running it with, lets say -o7 arguments is enough for optipng to compress your image and reduce some 15 to 30% of picture size

optipng -o7 what-ever-image-you-have.png

optipng-example-on-reducing-image-screenshot-24.9-png-image-compression

2. Compress images without loosing quality recursively inside directory and subdirectories with optiping

a.) To optimize all pictures inside a single directory (without sub-directories) on remote server you can run, below command:
 

cd whatever-dir/
for i in *.png; do optipng -o6 -quiet -keep -preserve -dir optimized -log optipng-compress.log "$i"; done


As you can see a log is being written on what the command has done and the originals of the optimized images is going to be preserved, the optimize level is 6 is the PNG encoding level.

 

cd /var/www/your-site/images/
find . -type f -iname "*.png" -print0 | xargs -I {} -0 optipng -o6 -keep -preserve -log optipng-compress.log "{}"


This command is pretty handy to run on own dedicated server, if you don't have one just do it on your Linux computer at home or if you don't own a PC with Linux install any Deb / RPM based Linux inside VirtualBox or VMWare Virtual Machine and do it there, then upload to your Hosting Provider / Amazon EC2 etc and Enjoy the increased website performance 🙂

 

Beatuiful Coptic Orthodox Church hymns – Coptic Orthodox Church one of the most ancient Christian Churches

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

Coptic Hymn – Hos Erouf

A curious custom of the Coptic Church is the liturgy that prays and sings it in Coptic, the original language of ancient Egypt. The Church keeps alive the language of the pharaohs, which was written in hieroglyphics, hieratic and demotic and now a modified version of the Greek alphabet, Egyptian written in Greek and demotic (the Copt) was gradually being forgotten, lost ground to the Arabic and thus became incomprehensible. However, the Coptic Church preserved the ancient Egyptian language by tradition thanks to its rites. The video shows images and also religious Copts of pharaonic Egypt, the Copts are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who have become Christians

O lord Jesus help me.coptic hymn – An coptic hymn in arabic language (not coptic) with english subtitle

Coptic orthodox St Mary Hymn

One can see the Roman Catholic influence on some of the shown icons. The music however is simply terrific!
The Coptic Christian spirituality can be felt. It is well known fact from egypt a lot of monks has spread Chrisian faith in Western Europe.

Je Nai Nan Lord have mercy, coptic orthodox hymns جي ناي نان, ارحمنا

Oh poor Christians of our age we are. We have no love we have nothing.

Coptic Orthodox Hymn: The Virgin M.A.R.Y العدرا م ر ي م (English Subtitles)

"O Sing Unto Him…" Coptic Orthodox Hymn

Blessed is He (Evlogimenos Palm Sunday Festal Hymn English) – Orthodox Hymn (Coptic Rite)

I live in the Netherlands, here people are slowly forgetting their faith who made them what they're now. The state of Christian Church is so weak. We have no prayer power. We walk sick, we don't live like brothers, Oh Lord help us and re-unite your sheeps and put us back in your farm. Lord Have Mercy, Lord Have Mercy, Lord Have Mercy

Coptic Orthodox Hymn: Aripsalin – آربصالين O sing unto Him who was crucified, buried and resurrected, who trampled and abolished death, praise Him and exalt Him above all. Take off the old man, and put on the new and superior one, come closer to greatness of mercy, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + All you Christian people, the priests and the deacons, glorify the Lord for He is worthy, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + Come to us O three children, whom Christ our God has lifted, and from the Devil has delivered, praise Him and exalt Him above all. For the sake of your God the Messiah, the Giver of all good things, come unto us O Hananiah, praise Him and exalt Him above all. O Azariah the zealot, morning and noon and the evening, glorify the power of the Trinity, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + Behold Emmanuel [our Lord], is now in our midst O Mishael, proclaim with the voice of joy, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + Gather now and persevere, and proclaim with the priests, bless the Lord all His works, praise Him and exalt Him above all. The heavens declare the glory, of God until this day, O you angels whom He has made, praise Him and exalt Him above all. Now all you powers of the Lord, bless His honored name, O sun and moon and all the stars, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + And also you rain and dew, sing praises unto our Savior, for He is the God of our fathers, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + Glorify the Lord O clouds and winds, together with the souls and the spirits, O you cold and fire and heat, praise Him and exalt Him above all. You also nights and days, light and darkness and lightning, glorify the Lover of Mankind, praise Him and exalt Him above all. You trees and all that springs on the earth, and all that moves in the sea, mountains and the forests, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + Praise without ceasing, the Lord the King of the kings, O you rivers and seas, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + And we also seeing them, let us say with all these things, bless the Lord all you birds, praise Him and exalt Him above all. O snow and ice, cattle and wild beasts, bless the Lord of lords, praise Him and exalt Him above all. Bless the Lord as befits Him, and not like the heretics, all you sons of men, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + O Israel offer before Him, honor and glory in a joyful voice, all you priests of Emmanuel, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + You servants of the true God, the souls of the righteous, and the humble and the charitable, praise Him and exalt Him above all. God my God is the One, who saved you from danger, O Sedrach Misach and Abednago, praise Him and exalt Him above all. Hurry with great haste, O you righteous of the Lord, and all the creatures He has made, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + Coolness and repose without ceasing, grant unto all of us, that we may joyfully proclaim, praise Him and exalt Him above all. + And also Your poor servant Sarkis, make him without condemnation, that he may join all those and say, praise Him and exalt Him above all.

Change website .JS .PHP Python Perl CSS etc. file permissions recursively for Better Tightened Security on Linux Webhosting Servers

Friday, October 30th, 2015

change-permissions-recursively-on-linux-to-protect-website-against-security-breaches-hacks

It is a common security (breach) mistake that developers or a web design studio make with dedicated or shared hosted websites do to forget to set a nice restrictive file permissions.

This is so because most people (and especially nowdays) developers are not a security freaks and the important think for a programmer is to make the result running in shortest time without much caring on how secure that is.
Permissions issues are common among sites written in PHP / Perl / Python with some CSS and Javascript, but my observations are that JavaScript websites especially that are using some frameworks such as Zend / Smarty etc. and are using JQuery are the most susceptible to suffer from permission security holes such as the classic 777 file permissions, because of developers who’re overworking and pushed up for a deadlines to include new functionality on websites and thus often publish their experimental code on a Production systems without a serious testing by directly uploading the experimental code via FTP / WinSCP on Production system.

Such scenarios are very common for small and middle sized companies websites as well as many of the hobbyist developers websites running on ready CMS system platforms such as Joomla and WordPress.
I know pretty well from experience this is so. Often a lot of the servers where websites are hosted are just share-servers without a dedicated sysadmin and thus there are no routine security audits made on the server and the security permissions issue might lead to a serious website compromise by a cracker and make your website quickly be banned from Google / Yahoo / Ask Jeeves / Yandex and virtually most of Search Engines because of being marked as a spammer or hacked webiste inside some of the multiple website blacklists available nowdays.

Thus it is always a good idea to keep your server files (especially if you’re sysadmin) with restrictive permissions by making the files be owned by superuser (root) in order to prevent some XSS or vulnerable PHP / Python / Perl script to allow you to easily (inject) and overwrite code on your website.

1. Checking whether you have a all users read, write, executable permissions with find command

The first thing to do on your server to assure you don’t have a low security permissioend files is:

find /home/user/website -type f -perm 777 -print

You will get some file as an output like:

./www/tpl/images/js/ajax-dynamic-list/js/ajax-dynamic-list.js
./www/tpl/images/js/ajax-dynamic-list/js/ajax_admin.js
./www/tpl/images/js/ajax-dynamic-list/js/ajax_teams.js
./www/tpl/images/js/ajax-dynamic-list/js/ajax.js
./www/tpl/images/js/ajax-dynamic-list/js/ajax-dynamic-list_admin.js
./www/tpl/images/js/ajax-dynamic-list/lgpl.txt

2. Change permissions recursively to read, write and exec for root and read for everybody and set all files to be owned by (root) superuser

Then to fix the messy permissions files a common recommended permissions is 744 (e.g. Read / Write and Execute permissions for everyone and only read permissions for All Users and All groups).
Lets say you want to make files permissions to 744 just for all JavaScript (JQuery) files for a website, here is how:

find . -iname ‘*.js’ -type f -print -exec chown root:root ‘{}’ \;
find . -iname ‘*.js’ -type f -print -exec chmod 744 ‘{}’ \;

First find makes all Javascript files be owned by root user / group and second one sets all files permissions to 744.

To make 744 all files on server (including JPEG / PNG Pictures) etc.:

find . -iname /home/users/website -type f -print -exec chown root:root ‘{}’ \;
find . -iname /home/users/website -type f -print -exec chmod 744 ‘{}’ \;

Optimize WordPress Pictures with EWWW Image Optimizer, Async JS and CSS and Autoptimize for better Search Engine Ranking

Tuesday, December 9th, 2014

 


wordpress-ewww-image-optimizer_settings_screenshot-plugin-seo-for-images-wp_3

While optimizing picture performance with console tools optipng, jpegoptin, jpegtran, pngcrush (could save you a lot of server space and make pictures downloads faster (and hence increase your website responsiveness and SEO – check out), still for Blogs and WebSites based on WordPress its not worthy to loose time with console acrobatics but simply use EWWW Image Optimizer to Optimize all old or new uploaded Images.

To work EWWW Image Optimizer needs jpegtran, optipng, pngout and gifsicle to be installed on the Linux / BSD server. EWWW Image Optimizer can load the command line tools also from a Cloud, if a cloud service is running on the server. Once installed the plugin does scan all the imported WordPress Media files and can be run to optimize picture files on present blog psot / pages.

EWWW Image Opitimizer plugin does a good job in reducing file size on  NextGEN, GRAND FlAGallery galleries.

wordpress-ewww-image-optimizer_settings_screenshot-plugin-seo-for-images-wp

Here is how EWWW Image Optimizer works taken from plugin's website:
How are JPGs optimized?

Lossless optimization is done with the command jpegtran -copy all -optimize -progressive -outfile optimized-file original-file. Optionally, the -copy switch gets the 'none' parameter if you choose to strip metadata from your JPGs on the options page. Lossy optimization is done using the outstanding JPEGmini utility.
It is better if the server has not the jpegtran, pngout, gifsicle utilities installed as the plugin provides an uptodate static compiled Linux binaries.

How are PNGs optimized?

There are three parts (and all are optional). First, using the command pngquant original-file, then using the commands pngout-static -s2 original-file and optipng -o2 original-file. You can adjust the optimization levels for both tools on the settings page. Optipng is an automated derivative of pngcrush, which is another widely used png optimization utility.

How are GIFs optimized?

Using the command gifsicle -b -O3 –careful original file. This is particularly useful for animated GIFs, and can also streamline your color palette. That said, if your GIF is not animated, you should strongly consider converting it to a PNG. PNG files are almost always smaller, they just don't do animations. The following command would do this for you on a Linux system with imagemagickconvert somefile.gif somefile.png

wordpress-ewww-image-optimizer_settings_screenshot-plugin-seo-for-images-wp

Some othe plugins that could strenghten your WordPress Search Engine Optimization ranking worthy to check are:
 

  • Async JS and CSS
     

Most importantly plugin solves "Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS" warning shown during site audit with  Google Developers PageSpeed InsightBy the way Google PageSpeed Insight is a precious tool so I recommend you check if you already haven't, Google's suggestions could often double or triple daily site visitors 

What Async JS and CSS does is:

Converts render-blocking CSS and JS files into NON-render-blocking, improving performance of web page

async_js_and_css_wordpress-plugin_configuration_menu

The plugin makes ALL scripts loaded by other plugins to be loaded in asynchronous. All CSS files will be inserted inline into the document code or moved from the document beginning to the end, just before closing BODY tag (or just where you placed wp_foot() function). There are various methods to do that via plugin configuration page.
 

  • Autoptimize

     

     

     

    Wordpress-Autoptimize-screenshot-a-plugin-to-minify-wordpress-html-js-and-css-scripts

Autoptimize speeds up your website and helps you save bandwidth by aggregating and minimizing JS, CSS and HTML.

What does the plugin do to help speed up site?

It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head, and scripts to the footer. It also minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight. Autoptimize is very much like WP Mnify (CSS / JS) minifaction WP plugin. The only difference and reason why you might want to use WP Mnify is it does HTML minification – something that WP Minify does not. Both plugins play nice together the only thing to be careful is not to configure CSS / JS minification in both Autoptimize and WP Minifyas this might slower instead of fasten the WP site.

A great bunch of other useful WP plugins to make a WordPress Blog friendly to Search Engines is here.

Converting jpeg / png pictures to mp4 format videos on Linux with avconv

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

making mp4 videos from jpeg and png pictures gnu linux
Here in my job, there is one internet (TV) around which can only read video formats in Mp4. Henceforth I needed a way to convert a number of JPEG / PNG format Picture files to Mp4. In my situation I needed to make video out of pictures and script it as this was required to be later pushed via FTP protocol to the Internet TV. Ater doing some research I figured out this is possible to build video out of pictures by using together ImageMagick and avconv.

First thing is to send pictures in certain resolution. There is a tool from imagemagick package called mogrify (which can do that). To convert a number of different dimension pictures to lets say 1024×768, used:

noah:~# mogrify -resize 1024×768 *.png

In earlier Linux distributions to create a movie from pictures ffmpeg was used like so:

# ffmpeg -qscale 5 -r 20 -b 9600 -i SDC%04d.png movie.mp4

However in newer version of ffmpeg support for this is removed, and to make video from images, there is other tool avconv. On most Linux distributions avconv is part of libav-tools package.

To install on avconv Debian and Ubuntu;
noah:~# apt-get install –yes libav-tools

Once installed to create single mp4 video from JPEG or PNG pictures:

noah:~# avconv -i SDC106001.JPG SDC10595.JPG SDC13611.JPG SDC13612.JPG SDC13614.JPG  movie-from-pictures.mp4

I found there is also a nice GUI,software Open Movie Editor, which can create video out of number of pictuers stored in a directory. 
Open Movie Editor is available in most Linux distributions (unfortunately as of time of writting on Debian Wheeze there is no install candidate of openmovieeditor), there is however substitute package doing the same job called openshot);
On latest Debian stable to install Openshot:

noah:~# apt-get install –yes openshot

openshot running on Debian Wheezy Linux create video from pictures

Openshot has an option (Import Image Sequence) from File -> Import Image Sequence. Using this option you can select a directory with fles with common prefix name lets say IMG*.png and create Video based on the photos inside.

Linux create video from images import image sequence Debian / Fedora and Ubuntu

On Ubuntu Linux or other distro where openmovieeditor is avialable install it with:

ubuntu:~# apt-get install –yes openmovieeditor

Openmovieeditor Linux create movies from images screenshot
To create a video out of pictures click on Media Browser tab. Choose the Folder with pictures from which video will be generated and drag them to the Video bar
(window).

To save produced video navigate to menus:

Project -> Render

and select format to save it as. One good codec to save output is Quicktime's. To convert later Quicktime MOV Video to MP4 video,
there is the  Pytube Media Converter script.

Well that's all enjoy your new videos from pictures 🙂

Show / Restore missing Gimp 2.8 Toolbox Menu on Debian Wheezy 7.0 Linux

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

After installing latest Debian Wheezy Linux on my Lenovo Thinkpad Notebook. One of first packages after very basic GNOME install was of course GIMP.

I edit images with GIMP mostly on daily basis, so life without GIMP is impossible…
Debian 7 comes with shiny new version of GIMP – GIMP 2.8. So far so good, but the problem is when started it for a first time, the default configuration is made in a way that it miss essential Gimp Panel Window (The Toolbox Window). Missing Brushes and selectors, move, scissors etc. is something really terrible.

My first guess was I can display it somehow from GIMP's View menu but after few minutes of try/errs I figured out this is not possible.

One menu I managed to displayed Toolbox in some mostly unusubale form, since they were not fitting well my 1024×768 resolution screen is via menus:

Windows -> Toolbox

Since this wasn't what I was looking for I spend some 10 minutes until I finally found "the fix". from menus:

Preferences -> Window Management -> Reset Saved Window Positions to Default Values

gimp 2.8 preferences menu screenshot debian gnu linux 7 wheeze screenshot

gimp 2.8 preferences menu restore saved window position to default values screenshot / display missing GIMP menus

Save ( Extract ) only images from PDF files on GNU / Linux in console and in GNOME nautilus

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

extract only pictures / ( images ) from PDF / PDF save only images

Some time ago, I've blogged how it is possible to dump a PDF individual pages into JPG / PNG etc. pics.

Today interestingly, I've learned it is possible to not only dump single or whole PDF document pages into pictures but also to selectively dump only the pictures contained within  PDF file into JPEGs.

Dumping only PDF (contained) images into external JPEG files is doable on GNU / Linux with pdfimages.

1. Extracting pictures from PDF in text console / terminal

pdfimages is part of poppler-utils deb package, if for some reasons you don't have pdfimages on ur system install poppler-utils with;

apt-get install --yes poppler-utils

To extract images of a certain PDF from terminal / console command line it is as simple as:

pdfimages -j pdf-file-name.pdf prefix-of-output-file

pdfimages
will extract all pictures, but bear in mind with some PDF versions it might incorrectly dump some text pages thinking it is pictures too. Also with some PDFs which contain scanned very old paper documents (as pictures) trying to force pdfimages to dump it will just provide you with all pages of the PDF in JPGs. Option -j instructs dumping images from PDF in JPEG picture format, whether the second argument will save pictures in files like: prefix-of-output-file-000.jpg, prefix-of-output-file-001.jpg, prefix..-file-002.jpg etc.

2. Adding GNOME nautilus capability to extract images from PDF files

Enabling extracting images in nautilus is possible with one non-default nautilus plugin  nautilus-scripts-manager

nautilis-scripts-manager is very nice, but I'm sure many Linux users did not know it yet. It makes possible to add any custom shell script that does an opeartion to be visible in nautilus via one extra menu Scripts. As not normally needed on most Linux distributions, it is not installed by default so you have to install it:

noah:~# apt-get install --yes nautilus-scripts-manager

Below is a Screenshot from my nautilus Scripts menu (my locale is in Bulgarian), so Scripts word is in Cyrillic "Скриптове" 🙂

nautilus scripts menu screenshot - allowing users to add custom shell scripts to run in GNOME desktop extract pictures from PDF Linux

After nautilus-scripts-manager is installed. To use it in your user home directory you will have to create ~/.gnome/nautilus-scripts, i.e.

$ mkdir ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts

Any script placed inside can be then invoked via the newly appeared nautilus "Scripts" menu. Thus to use extract_images_from_pdfs.sh from GUI place it there.

Download the following extract_images_from_pdfs.sh shell script

$ cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts
$ wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/files/extract_images_from_pdfs.sh
$ chmod +x extract_images_from_pdfs.sh

If you prefer to copy paste script content:

$ cat ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/extract_images_from_pdf.sh
#!/bin/bash
# Extracts image files from PDF files
# For more information see www.boekhoff.info
## Added check for $1 existence and $1_images dir
existence check by hip0
# https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/
if [ $1 ]; then
if [ ! -d ./$1_images ]; then
mkdir -p ./"$1_images"
fi
pdfimages -j "$1" ./"$1_images"/PDFimage
gdialog --title "Report" --msgbox "Images were successfully extracted!"
exit 0
fi

 

Well that's all. Once you select a PDF and you click with last mouse button on it selecting Scripts -> extract_images_from_pdf.sh a new directory containing the filename prefix of the selected PDF with _images will appear. For exmpl. if pictures are extracted from PDF named filename.PDF in same directory where the file is present you will get new filename_images folder with all pictures dumped from the PDF.

I've learned about pdfimages existence from Sven Boekhoff's blog which btw has plenty of interesting other stuff

 

Well that's it hope this helps, someone. Comments are welcome 🙂

Converting JPEG Images to ASCII Art text (picture) in Microsoft Windows (2000 / XP / Vista / 7)

Friday, May 18th, 2012

A friend of mine, just mentioned about a program ASCIIPic – capable of converting graphic images in JPEG to plain text ASCII in Microsoft Windows OSes.
Yesterday I blogged about caca-utils (img2txt) – console tool to convert picture graphics to plain text ASCII , so knowing of the Windows freeware ASCIIPic existence catched my attention and I decided to give it a try to get idea what is situation with Images to ASCII text convertion in Windows? 🙂.

1. Generating ASCII from JPEG images with ASCII Pic

As I don't have a Microsoft Windows OS at hand, I downloaded it and run it on my Debian notebook with WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) MS-Windows emulator.

For my surprise the program run succesfuly its GUI interface and worked pretty smooth even emulated on Linux.

ASCII Pic 2.0 JPG PNG GIF to ASCII text MS Windows Convertor screenshot

As of time of writting, the latest version of the freeware program available is 2.0. You see in above screenshot the program is pretty intutive to use. You select an Input file, an Output file and you're ready to Process the image to TXT.
One small note to make here is the program couldn't recognize as Input files images in PNG or GIF formats, it seems the only image formats the program recognizes as input are JPEG and BMP.

ASCII Pic Windows image to ASCII program picture shot

The converted images to ASCII results are quite unsatisfactory, I tried converting few pictures originally in size 1024×768 but the produced ASCII was messy huge (the program didn't automatically set height / width dimensions to 60×80 and therefore, when I revied the produced pictures, they were very ugly and hardly readable. It could be the same image looks better if reviewed in MS-Windows Notepad but I seriously doubt that …

I thought some improvement to the produced ASCII image might be possible from the app options so I played around with the Zoom, Negation, Brightness and Monochrome options, none of them had a drastic change on the output. Using any of the program options didn't make the output TXT "image" to look closer riginal JPEGs..

ASCII Pic 2.0 Windows picture to ASCII Program options screenshot

ASCII Pic official website contains a number of other tiny tools, like WinKill and RemoteShut, however most of the tools are already too obslete and useless just like ASCII Pic

If I have to compare ASCIIPic produced ASCII Images to libcaca's Linux img2txt, asciipic's ASCII images are a piece of crap.

2. jp2a command line tool image to ASCII generator

As of time of writting a good alternative program I found for Windows is jp2a
jp2a is a free GPL-ed software available for all major operating system architectures Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows.
jp2a is a command line tool and lacks any GUI interface but if compared to ASCII Pic the output ASCII image is awesome.

jp2a Windows binary can be downloaded from here , also I've made a mirror of windows jp2a bin in case if it disappears here

3. ASCII Generator 2 (asc2gen) – Windows GUI Images to ASCII generator

ASC 2 Gen is actually the best I can find program to convert images to ascii in Win as of time of writting.
Just like img2txt it generates pretty decent looking text images.

ASC2Gen failed to run emulated on my Linux host with wine version 1.0.1, hence to test it I used a a Windows host via teamviewer.

Below are few screenshots illustrating most of the options ASCII2GEN provides:

asc2gen Microsoft Windows image to ascii generator inverted penguins screenshot

asc2gen penguins in inverted color set (black color text background)

ASC2Gen backhead penguins ascii picture screenshot

ASC2GEN flipped backhed generated image to ASCII

ascii2gen generate images to ascii in colors Microsoft Windows shot

Picture to ASCII text converted with ASCII colors

Dithering Windows image to ascii text generated picture ASCII

ascii2gen dithering level option shot

asc2gen jpeg, png, gif to plain text ascii brightness contrast screenshot pic

asc2gen contrast / brigthness atune shot

ascii2gen penguins converted images to plain text inverted with capital letters for picture

asc2gen save as options shot

Something else nice is it supports a lot of image file formats as input including (BMP and GIF) images.
I've also made a mirror of asc2gen v. 2.0.0 here

While researching online, I found plenty of other Image to ASCII geneartors, however as I didn't tested them I can't say if they are  better ones.
Anyways I will be happy to hear if anyone knows other good ASCII generator alternative progs for Winblows?