Nautilus Scripts allow for easily processing files from the familiar setting of your file browser. We will first take a look at the simple task of using Nautilus Scripts. Then we will learn how to install the scripts. At the end you’ll find a list of links to the Nautilus Scripts that I have made with a short description of each.

Using Nautilus Scripts

Using Nautilus Script is very easy. You simply open the Nautilus file browser and right-click with your mouse some where in the window. If you have any scripts installed then an entry reading “Scripts” should appear. When you select the “Scripts” entry a sub-menu will display a list of all the Nautilus Scripts that are installed along with an option to open the Nautilus Scripts folder itself. Selecting the name of the script that you’d like to use will execute that script.

Most Nautilus Scripts process files and require you to select one or more files to execute. This is not always the case, though.

Installing Nautilus Scripts

Nautilus searches for the scripts to place in the “Scripts” menu in the “nautilus-scripts” directory. So, on Ubuntu Linux the scripts should be placed in “/home/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts”. The “.” in front of “gnome2″ means that this is a hidden folder. In order to see this folder, enable viewing hidden folders from the view menu in Nautilus.

Once you’ve found and placed your script in the “nautils-scripts” folder your almost finished. The last step is to make the script executable. That means allowing the program to, well, act like a program. To do this you can right-click with your mouse on the file you just moved. Choose “Properties” at the bottom or the menu. You’re now faced with a window with a row of tabs. Click on the tab that reads “Permissions”. You should now see a group of check boxes in that window that says “Read”, “Write”, “Execute”. Check the box “Execute” beside “Owner” (That’s you). Close the window and your script should appear in the menu as described above.

Organizing Scripts

Once you accumulate a few scripts you may want to organize them according to there function or some other criteria. If you add a folder named “Images” under the “nautilus-scripts” folder, the next time you open the “Scripts” sub-menu you should see an entry named “Images” with a small arrow beside it indicating that this entry is a sub-menu not a script. Now you can put all your image processing scripts in “Images” and live a more tidy existance.

My Scripts

• ImageTool - Allows you to easily resize and/or change the quality of all selected images in a folder using an easy to use interface and puts the resulting images in a new folder called “converted”. It silently ignores selected files that aren’t images allowing you to quickly use select all on a folder to convert images. The files saved to the “converted” folder are renamed as such… [size]px[quality][orginal file name]. If the file size is not changed, “orig-” replaces “[size]px”. This allows you to make several versions of the same files without overwritiing the already converted files with different settings. (Requirments: Imagemagick, Zenity, Gtk 2.0 or better)