Phatch (PHoto & bATCH) is a raster graphics editor used to batch process digital graphics and photographs. Phatch can be used on the desktop as a GUI program or on the server as a console program.

Operation

Typical actions include resizing, rotating, cropping, converting, applying shadows, rounded corners, perspective, reflection, and converting between different image formats. Phatch can also be used to rename or copy image files based on the

Exif Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other syste ...

IPTC Information Interchange Model The Information Interchange Model (IIM) is a file structure and set of metadata attributes that can be applied to text, images and other media types. It was developed in the early 1990s by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC ...

tags. The image inspector can be used to explore the metadata tags stored in images. The tabs can be passed to any action, which is especially useful for renaming or copying files, but also for data-stamping such as date, time, aperture or shutter speed on the picture. Multiple inspectors can be opened at once to compare tag values with a preview of the image. Phatch can turn itself into a droplet which stays a small graphic on top of the other windows. It processes any images which are dragged and dropped on it. Phatch has a built in interactive Python console to explore the internals of the program.

Development

Phatch is being developed on Linux (Ubuntu) by

Stani Michiels Stani Michiels is a visual artist, architect, and coin designer who was born in 1973 in Geel (Belgium). He lives and works in the Netherlands (Amsterdam). Michiels has a master's degree in architecture from the Catholic University of Leuven (1991� ...

. The logo, mascot and some icons are designed by Admiror Design Studio. The other icons are taken from the

Open Clip Art Library Openclipart, also called Open Clip Art Library, is an online media repository of free-content vector clip art. The project hosts over 160,000 free graphics and has billed itself as "the largest community of artists making the best free original ...

. The image processing of Phatch is done with the

Python Imaging Library Python Imaging Library is a free and open-source additional library for the Python programming language that adds support for opening, manipulating, and saving many different image file formats. It is available for Windows, and Linux. The lat ...

. Phatch uses Bazaar in combination with

Launchpad A launch pad is an above-ground platform from which rocket- missiles or space launch vehicles take off vertically. Launch pad may also refer to: Computing * Launchpad (macOS), an application launcher introduced in Mac OS X Lion * Launch Pad (s ...

for coordinating its development and translations. Phatch has a

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

(

wxPython wxPython is a wrapper for the cross-platform GUI API (often referred to as a "toolkit") wxWidgets (which is written in C++) for the Python programming language. It is one of the alternatives to Tkinter. It is implemented as a Python extensio ...

) API and is extensible through Python.

Limitations

Phatch does not provide a live preview of the image manipulation and has no built in support for remote file systems. Although Phatch runs from source on Windows and Mac OS X, there are no final binary installers available for these platforms, although a pre-release binary installer for OS X was made available by the developers in May 2010.

Distribution

The source code of Phatch is released on its homepage. Binary packages are available in the repositories of the major

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

distributions such as Debian,

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

ArchLinux Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...

, Fedora and

OpenSuse openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

. Phatch requires

and

(2.6 or more) for the GUI. Users can install pyexiv2 for better Exif and IPTC IIM support. Currently the website is down and Phatch is no longer downloadable along with python dependencies for Phatch.

Critical reception

Softpedia Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts various downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. Website Softpedia hosts reviews written by its staff—each review in ...

's editor's review of Phatch 0.0.bzr157 overall awarded 4 stars, highlighting the clean and simple interface, program stability, and batch processing actions. Allowing the user to use Python to create additional batch process was also seen as an advantage over similar products. Criticisms included the lack of a help file or preferences menu. Some processes such as "Convert Mode" caused errors that were not reported to the error log. It was the opinion of

Linux Pratique Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which inc ...

magazine that Phatch 0.1.3 filled the gap between GIMP and

Imagemagick ImageMagick, invoked from the command line as magick, is a free and open-source cross-platform software suite for displaying, creating, converting, modifying, and editing raster images. Created in 1987 by John Cristy, it can read and write ov ...

, with a user-friendly interface saving a lot of time for batch processing. Overall it was felt that it offered fewer features than these two programs. Phatch 0.1.6 was featured together with GIMP on the front page of Linux+ magazine, May 2009.

References

External links

* {{Raster graphics editors Free software programmed in Python Free raster graphics editors Free photo software Raster graphics editors for Linux Digital photography IRIX software Macintosh graphics software MacOS graphics software Windows graphics-related software Software that uses wxPython