Rescale pictures with ffmpeg

for file in *.jpg; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -vf scale=iw*.5:ih*.5 "$file".half.jpg;done

FFmpeg has got a very powerful scale filter, which can be used to accomplish various tasks. Some of them are listed here. More can be found in the official documentation. In all the examples, the starting image (input.jpg) will be this one (535x346 pixels):

If you need to simply resize your video to a specific size (e.g 320x240), you can use the scale filter in its most basic form:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -vf scale=320:240 output.avi

Same works for images too:

ffmpeg -i input.jpg -vf scale=320:240 output_320x240.png

The resulting image will look like this:

As you can see, the aspect ratio is not the same as in the original image, so the image appears stretched. If we'd like to keep the aspect ratio, we need to specify only one component, either width or height, and set the other component to -1. For example, this command line:

ffmpeg -i input.jpg -vf scale=320:-1 output_320.png

will set the width of the output image to 320 pixels and will calculate the height of the output image according to the aspect ratio of the input image. The resulting image will have a dimension of 320x207 pixels.

There are also some useful constants which can be used instead of numbers, to specify width and height of the output image. For example, if you want to stretch the image in such a way to only double the width of the input image, you can use something like this (iw = input width constant, ih = input height constant):

ffmpeg -i input.jpg -vf scale=iw*2:ih input_double_width.png

The output image will look like this:

If you want to half the size of the picture, just multiply by .5

ffmpeg -i input.jpg -vf scale=iw*.5:ih*.5 input_half_size.png

Sometimes there is a need to scale the input image in such way it fits into a specified rectangle, i.e. if you have a placeholder (empty rectangle) in which you want to scale any given image. This is a little bit tricky, since you need to check the original aspect ratio, in order to decide which component to specify and to set the other component to -1 (to keep the aspect ratio). For example, if we would like to scale our input image into a rectangle with dimensions of 320x240, we could use something like this:

ffmpeg -i input.jpg -vf scale="'if(gt(a,4/3),320,-1)':'if(gt(a,4/3),-1,240)'" output_320x240_boxed.png

The output image will look like this:

The area below the image is shaded with boxes to show there was some additional space left in the box, due to the original image not having the same aspect ratio as the box, in which the image was supposed to fit.

Of course, this approach is only used when your input image is not known in advance, because if it was known, you would easily figure out if you need to use either:

-vf scale=320:-1

or

-vf scale=-1:240