I am looking for free, preferably open, alternatives to ACDSee for batch editing work. While I can do much of the work well on ACDSee, it's not entirely satisfactory despite having to pay for it. I need at least the following batch editing functions:
Resize using either height or width and maintain aspect ration
Auto contrast
text overlays
and occasionally, cropping
oh, I make extensive use of renaming features as well
Couple of issues with ACDSee are: I always need to highlight the Exposure section or auto contrast will not be done despite it being saved in the preset; and I can't define, move around the cropping box, forcing me to manually crop tons of images.
I'm not an advanced, or "power photo-editor". I only require the basic stuff I described to be automated. My personal feature wish list (I'm pretty sure something so niche doesn't exist) would be text overlay based on the image names (images are named as image-1_1, image-1_2 or image-2_c1_1, image-2_c1_2, and text overlay would Image-1 and Image-2 C1 and Image-2 C2).
I tried digiKam, but damn that thing is huge. It runs very slowly on my Pentium 4 and 1.5 GB RAM. On top of being a program with over 1 GB of files, the KDE library it uses is always slow regardless of it running on either Windows or Linux.
