Reducing the size of pictures

My photos are distributed in a directory in folders which are organized by name and date (2002-10-Halloween, 2002-11-Birthday, 2002-11-Movie Night, for example).

Some of the photos are ridiculously big, as my brother's a photographer and his pictures are now taking up a considerable proportion of my hard drive. I was thinking making copies of these photos but with a reduced size, and moving the originals to a HD.

So Ideally, I need a resizing program that can take parameters so that it only reduces pictures above a certain limit to the size i want (e.g. reduce size to 500kb if size>1mb), or something similar. And I want a program that can work in batches, as opposed to individual pictures.

Any recommendations?

 

You can do batch processing in The GIMP (which is free), not sure you can program it to check file size first though.

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Batch/

The GIMP is very highly regarded for most image processing requirements.

 

You might also want to try out Photodrop
http://www.aramk.net/photodrop/photodrop_splash.php
You can change the quality to like medium, or specify a specific size if you want.

 

kind of OT and i apologize but does anyone know how to add text to a picture? thanks!