1) Why Gurkes Fotobatch?
2) What can Gurkes Fotobatch do? A Quickstart
3) More detailled features and advantages
4) Screenshots
5) The commandlinetools
6) Advanced

Why Gurkes Fotobatch?

When I formerly copied photos from cam to hard disk, I often liked to execute a "rename, compress, turn"-chain easily - but I only found complicated ways to do so. I need this process chain for publishing my photos on the web or to send photos via email and so on. But even after searching for a very very long time I could not discover a free software that allowed executing this chain of commands with only a few clicks. I had to use combinations of different software, resulting in many annoying worksteps. I could not believe that there was no software that could do what I wanted.

So I started building Gurkes Fotobatch. The result is specialized for my usecase, but I hope that it helps you, too.

What can Gurkes Fotobatch do? A Quickstart

To introduce the basic features let us consider the usecase I built Gurkes Fotobatch for:

Create a folder (from now on called dir) on your disk for your new pictures (digital photos). name it like this: 'YYYYMMDD_eventname'. This is useful for the autodetection of eventname and, of course, for sorting your events by date in the filesystem. Copy your photos to dir.
Start Gurkes Fotobatch, choose dir, click EXECUTE SELECTED and wait until finished.

The result (if you did not change any option):

The picturefiles in dir got renamed to 'JJJJMMTTHHMMSS__eventname__originalname'. 'JJJJMMTTHHMMSS' is the file-modified-date that should match the recording time. So from now on every essential information on the picture is stored in the filename (convenient for me).
These renamed files got compressed (resized to max. 1024 px width and max. 1024 px height @ 70% JPEG quality) and stored in a compression directory in dir.
The compressed files were turned by their EXIF orientation flag. Their file-modified-date was restored (by EXIF information).

So the original pictures are substantially kept untouched (except for the filename) and the compressed ones are READY TO PUBLISH!. An illustrated tutorial can be found in my blog. This is a good point to start with.

More detailled features and advantages

Gurkes Fotobatch estimates eventname and compression directory from dir. Of course, you can change everything (including the resize parameters) easily via GUI.
Additionally, you are able to start renaming, compression and turning/timestamping (manipulation by EXIF-data) seperately by simple button-clicks. What the buttons do:

execute selected:	starts all selected tasks in sequence. progressbar is for compression only.
rename and compress:	these buttons do what they should do :-) selection is irrelevant.
manipulate:	selection-sensitive: decide whether you want to rotate, change timestamp or both. You can apply the manipulation for the original pictures or for the compressed ones.

With the possibility to execute the special actions seperately, Gurkes Fotobatch can be used for some special cases. Obvious examples:

You can use Gurkes Fotobatch as Autorotate-by-EXIF-tool only without rename or compress.
You can use Gurkes Fotobatch as batch resize tool only.

There are some advantages Gurkes Fotobatch brings along that are not obvious right away:

Damaged file creation times (e.g. from turning photos with Windows' built-in viewer) of the original photos can easily be reset to recording time (EXIFtime) with
EXIFtime->FILEtime + manipulate original pictures + manipulate
This often was usefull for me.
After renaming the filenames begin with recording time (time resolution: second). If the camera's clocks are well synchronized, you can mix photos from different cameras in one folder resulting in the correct chronological order when you sort by name (this is what many web album generators do automatically). This is great if there is more than one person taking photos of the event you want to produce a web album of! Just take the pictures from the different cameras, mix them in the same directory, use Gurkes Fotobatch and create your web album with the compressed files. The chronological order of the photos in the web album will be correct.

Screenshots

initial picture directory
choose picture directory
directory chosen, event name detected
selected tasks done
initial picture directory after Fotobatch run
compressed/resized picture directory after Fotobatch run

The commandlinetools

Gurkes Fotobatch is a GUI for different commandlinetools. It is written and compiled with AutoHotKey (www.autohotkey.com and www.autohotkey.com/de). I carefully selected the tools and I think I got the optimal tool for each task.
Here is the list of commandlinetools I use for file- and image processing in Gurkes Fotobatch:

BRC32.exe:	Bulk Rename Command, Version 1.3.3.0 http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Download.php
PhotoResize.exe:	Picture Resizer, Version 3.0 http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize
jhead.exe:	jhead Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool, Version 2.84 http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead I added "-trim" to the jpegtran-call and recompiled jhead. This prevents the compressed files from having "odd borders"
jpegtran.exe:	used by jhead for image rotation, Version 21-Sep-2003 http://sylvana.net/jpegcrop/jpegtran

Let me describe the advantages of the software acting on your images:

Picture Resizer is using a "high-quality resizing method" and working at "high speed". So you get best results after resizing your pictures. There are some more really essential features Picture Resizer offers like keeping EXIF data. I could not find any small tool offering the same features in this precious combination.

jpegtran is a software from the Independent JPEG Group and performs lossless rotation of JPEGs! So there is no loss of quality after rotation!

jhead makes sure, that the EXIF headers remain properly (even after rotation). So - using Gurkes Fotobatch - your resized pictures have correct EXIF headers.

Advanced

Of course you can change anything you want directly in the AutoHotkey script source! There e.g. you can modify the rename pattern.