Phatch 0.2.7.1

Overview

The name Phatch comes from a combination of the words “Photo” and “Batch”, implying that the software’s purpose is to edit photos in batches. Phatch is a popular option among users when it comes to quick photo editing, since it includes many useful features such as resizing, rotating, adjusting shadows, viewing and editing EXIF and IPTC metadata, plus it has a nice GUI for an easy work.

Installation

If you’re a Windows users, then you’ll see that the installation of this program is not like the typical software installation you encounter most times; this is due to the fact that apart from the ZIP file you download containing the installer you also have to download three other components and install them first. Those are Python, wxpython and PIL (Python Imaging Library). After installing them you can then extract the ZIP package you downloaded and navigate to a subfolder named phatch. Double click on the file called phatch.py and wait until the program loads. You can create a shortcut of this file on your desktop if you wish for quicker access. In other words, if you’re not using Linux or an OS that isn’t Windows, you’re gonna have a bad time installing the software. But since the process isn’t very convenient for Windows users and many people might have trouble completing it, the developers of Phatch provide a single (but big) ZIP package with all the required dependencies here: http://photobatch.wikidot.com/install#toc9. Users will still have to install said components, but they just don’t have to download them separately.

Supported operating systems other than Windows (2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8) are Ubuntu/Debian, Archilinux, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Linux and Mac OS X.

Interface

The mascot of the program is a green robot with 4 arms holding some tools, and this bud is what you see in the white background of the window that opens when you run the program. There are 5 menus in the menu bar (File, Edit, View, Tools and Help) and several buttons in the toolbar. After adding a few images in the list you can start editing them by clicking on the “+” icon in the toolbar (3^rd button from left). The drop-down list that appears includes the actions you can perform with Phatch on the images.

Pros

The biggest advantage of this tool is that it’s cross-platform and supports various operating systems (which we mentioned earlier). Many programs are limited to just one OS and restrict users with other operating systems from using them.

Phatch accepts many input file formats: bmp, dib, gif, jpe, jpeg, jpg, im, msp, pcx, png, pbm, ppm, tif, tiff, xbm and others.

With Phatch you can resize, rotate, invert and flip photos, or you can add watermarks, shadows, rounded corners and a lot more.

Reading and editing EXIF and IPTC tags is possible as well.

Cons

You might come across errors when trying to make the program work, as did we. Playing with the dependencies and their installed versions however will get you somewhere and eventually run Phatch (hopefully).

Alternatives

Image Tuner (free), ImBatch (paid), nConvert (free) and SharpShot (free) are all image editing software with many capabilities.

Conclusion

To sum up, Phatch can be of great use, especially to non-Windows users. Windows users might be better off with an alternative better suited for their OS.