Convert a massive amount of photos into another file format?

I recently got back from a two-week trip to Japan during which I took at least 2,000 photos, and I was wondering if anyone knows of a good way to convert many photos from jpeg to a file format that doesn't gradually lose info. All I've been able to find with searches of my own are cloud services that will do 10 photos at a time.

Thanks.

You could use Irfanview. It won't do much though - once something has jpeg artifacts, it has jpeg artifacts for life D:

FastStone Photo Resizer

That's a tool that lets you convert files in a batch, among other things. You don't actually have to resize the photos you convert, of course. That was just its original functionality. I used it when manipulating frames of animation for a school project back when I was in college.

I recommend IrfanView. If you're comfortable with a command line, you could also use ImageMagick.

So, I'm a nutcase, but whenever I do this, I use a unix-terminal and ImageMagick. So, for instance, if you have a bunch of .jpg's in a folder and want to convert them all to .png's, you could run the command:

ls | egrep "jpg$" | sed 's/.jpg//' | xargs -t -I{} convert {}.jpg {}.png

But then again, I'm a crazy person. Normal people use IrfanView or something like it.

(in my crazy person defense, learning how to properly use a terminal will make doing batch jobs of any kind a breeze. and all sorts of other computer tasks as well)

EDIT: just a note: I wrote this sort of quickly, so it's buggy and (I'm fairly certain) it won't work with filenames with spaces in them (just add quotes around the {}.jpg and {}.png parts to fix that). Use on your own risk.

@gkhan: @chaser324: @scrawnto: @beachthunder: Thanks, everyone. I'm giving Irfanview a try now because I don't have much experience with command lines or anything else, but I appreciate having some other options to look into.

And, beachthunder, I get that artifacts will remain, but will converting jpegs to something like pngs at least keep them from degrading further?

What do you mean degrade further? A jpeg doesn't get uglier the longer it sits on your hard drive.

If you process an image over and over and each time save it as a jpeg, each time the image will be very slightly degraded. I'm assuming that is what OP meant, though I don't really see the use-case where this will have much of any impact.

@slaegar: Maybe he means if he crops/edits it in some manner and then saves it again? As a jpeg, it would be re-encoded and some information would be lost. The png would retain the original artifacts, but shouldn't introduce new ones after cropping.

I've been using Paint.Net Layer Saver this whole time. I guess the other options are better.

@scrawnto: @slaegar: I was under the impression that simply opening a jpeg to view it resulted in some data loss. I finally looked at this article about jpegs and it seems to say was Scrawnto is saying about data loss only happening you make some change to it. So, I guess I don't really need to convert most of the pictures after all.

Another vote for Irfanview. Good batch renaming/conversion tools.

@rorie: I just sent a link to your Twitter account for a short video I took of a puppy while I was in Japan.