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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

What programs work well with BL2 for modifying image files?

We scanned an old slide (with the Win98 software for that scanner, a 
Microtek not on the S.A.N.E. list of supported scanners) and then needed 
some way to make the 5M tif into a 50k jpg.

Windows paint does not do tifs or jpegs.

Pictview, freeware for DOS, converts and resizes but the files was five 
times as big as it could handle.

Xpaint did a nice job converting to a 250K jpg but had no way to make a 
smaller jpeg (lower quality, smaller).

So we tried ImageMagick.  It objected to the format of the tif file and 
crashed, repeatedly.  We changed from 16 bit to 24 bit color so it would 
not need to spend loads of time doing a color reduction (which xpaint did 
not do or did faster).  It crashed, maybe faster than before, after a lot 
of cpu activity.  We have 32M RAM.  We turned on the 32M swap partition.  
It still crashed.  Did it crash due to size or file format?

So we fed it the 250K jpeg produced by xpaint and instructed it resize the 
file to something 480 pixels high and appropriately wide (you need to do 
your own calculation, it does not 'preserve ratio'.)  It produced a 480 
pixel high jpeg that consisted of the upper left corner of the tif!!!

So we took the 250K jpeg back to pictview and resized it there to a 
smaller jpeg of the whole photo.

What image editing programs for Linux will let us resize a jpeg, that 
don't crash with BL2 and 32M RAM?  Has ImageMagick worked for other BL2 
users?  There are suppoedly also console mode programs associated with it.  
Yes, I did install all the dependencies and made symlinks for the files 
that needed them.  (I did not install he whole package which contained the 
required files.)

I never thought we would need 3 operating systems to process one image.   

zgv displayed the jpegs perfectly, even though one was accidentally 
labelled .tif, but we did not see a way to resize (reduce quality).