bmp3jpg

The existence of this utility takes some explaining.  Encouraged by the availability of the free BMP2PNG program for automating conversion of bitmaps to PNGs (just search Google), I naturally searched for something called "BMP2JPG" when I needed it.  Such a thing exists: more than once, in fact, but the first one you find on Google is being sold for $99 a copy.  Now there's nothing wrong with selling such a utility, but $99 did seem a bit steep to me (I would have bought it had it been only $19, since it would have saved me a few hours).  The next thing I ran into was a program by Tomoaki Misaki, which with or without his consent had got out onto the web at large, and I downloaded it to find that it did the job!  However it was last updated in November 1994 and this lead to some undesirable features:

• It doesn't recognise long filenames (i.e. those more than 8.3 characters);
• It always works relative to the directory it is in, so if you place it in your c:\windows directory you'll have to use absolute paths almost all the time;
• Those paths can't have any directory names that are longer than 8 characters either;
• It doesn't recognise wildcards, so you have to do every file individually.

Therefore: bmp3jpg was written as a wrapper program to call BMP2JPG in such a way that everything is fixed with duct-tape and wildcards work as I wanted them to.  I also took the opportunity to add a "delete originals after encoding" commandline switch and a couple of others that rescale the image before turning it into a JPG, should you want thumbnails or suchlike.  All other switches are passed through to BMP2JPG and the help screen, which you get by running the program with no arguments, is a team effort between the two programs.  The 'scaling' feature was a slightly wicked thing to add on my part, since I'd copied the idea from the web page of the people selling the $99 version...

- - - [Download] - - -

Many of the files here are compressed with WinZip, a trial version of which you can download for free.
Over the next few months I may migrate the files to using WinRAR, which I've tested and found to offer roughly 25% better compression.

bmp3jpg and BMP2JPG (RAR file, 40KB; Zip file, 42KB).
To use as a commandline utility, place both the EXEs in your windows directory or system path.