I'm slowly getting up to speed with both SVGs and Inkscape. Apologies if this is obvious...

Is it possible to batch optimize images in a folder from the command line using Inkscape/Scour? I have around a hundred small (<10KB) images that I want to optimise and would like to around the tedium of opening and saving each one out.

I was hoping to move to the relevant folder and do something like this:



Is such a thing possible (I'm on OS X if that matters)?

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

Well I wasn't going to try to answer this message, since I don't know much about using the command line. But out of curiosity about Scour, I did some searching. On this page I found this:

"Command Line Script

To run scour on the command-line, first download and install Python, then download scour. The basics are:

$ python scour.py -i input.svg -o output.svg

In addition, you can use compressed svg (.svgz) on the input and output and scour will decompress/compress automatically."

I don't think that's for a batch operation. And you've probably already seen that page. But just in case, I thought I'd post it.

All best

Hi Brynn,

Yes, that's the default way of using Scour on the command line (although obviously it's built into Inkscape when you do save optimised SVG from the GUI). Sadly, it doesn't seem to like batch operations though. I'm certain there is a way to do it, I'm just not sure what the correct syntax is.

Hi benfrain

No need to run scour as scour is part of Inkscape (after v0.47?).
Just use the -l, --export-plain-svg=FILENAME and --vacuum-defs command line switches running Inkscape from the command line
http://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html

Report back if you need help making a script (batch file) to process your files.
( It would then be nice to know you OS )

RGDS
Ragnar

Sorry duplicate

Dear all,
Here is a way to do it in bash shell:

It searches for all the *.svg files in the current folder (.), executes for each match ( {} ) scour, then saves with a .svg2 appended extension. This way you keep the original files for comparaison matters, and if the scoured ones are good to go you can then use a bash script or a gui renaming tool to remove the svg2 extension.

Off course, you can add any scour parameters, for instance just before the closing \; to know more please type scour -h.

Hope it helps !