Converting WebP Images to Grayscale PNG on Ubuntu

So, it sounds like you’re diving into image conversion, and I totally get the confusion! Luckily, there’s a way to use ImageMagick to do what you need in one go, and yes, you can definitely do it in batch mode!

Using ImageMagick

First, make sure you have ImageMagick installed. You can check if it’s installed by running this command:

convert --version

If it’s not installed, you can get it with:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Now, to convert your WebP images to grayscale PNG in one go, you can use the following command:

magick mogrify -colorspace Gray -format png *.webp

This command will convert all the .webp files in your current directory to grayscale PNGs. The mogrify command modifies files in place, so remember to back up your images if you want to keep the originals!

Batch Processing with a Bash Script

If you want to have a little more control, you can write a simple Bash script. Here’s a quick example:

#!/bin/bash

for img in *.webp; do
    # Use basename to remove the extension and add .png
    output="${img%.webp}.png"
    magick convert "$img" -colorspace Gray "$output"
done

Save this script as convert_images.sh, give it execute permissions with chmod +x convert_images.sh, and run it in the directory with your WebP images.

Other Tools

While ImageMagick is powerful and great for command line use, you mentioned GIMP, which is a good GUI option if you ever change your mind. But since you prefer terminal commands, ImageMagick should serve you well!

Hope this helps clear things up and gets you on your way to converting those images!