The default file manager in the GNOME desktop environment is Nautilus. If you've been using GNOME for a while, then you're probably familiar with Nautilus' built in Nautilus Scripts function. The Scripts function is great, but there's an even better way to add functions to Nautilus; with Nautilus Actions.

I recently went looking for a way to rotate JPG images from within Nautilus, and found a nice way to do this and more. It’s not difficult to customize the right-click popup menu in Nautilus to perform custom actions on files. Here are some instructions and scripts to get you started.

The composite command from ImageMagick provides an easy way to watermark images. Without too much work you can write a script to do batch processing of your images. This way you can watermark a whole directory of images at once.

I've shown previously how to customize the Nautilus File Manager in GNOME/Ubuntu with Nautilus Actions. Today I'm going to show how to add custom items to the file manager context menu in KDE4/Kubuntu.

Actions? Aren’t all the menus, dialog boxes and commands enough, why would you want actions?

Linux is known for letting users configure settings to customize nearly every aspect of their desktops. In the past, this has largely been relegated to the more advanced crowd, since it often required editing text-based configuration files; but as Linux becomes more mature, many GUI programs are being written to allow easy customization of the user interface. The Nautilus Actions Configuration utility is one such program that lets you add custom commands to the right-click menu in Nautilus, the default file manager in Gnome.

GNOME's file manager, Nautilus, (as you would expect) is much more than just a plain file manager. There are so many configuration options and ways to extend the default GNOME file manager.

I've recently found some patched (by mriya3) Nautilus packages for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic (Nautilus 2.28.1) which has "Undo" and "Redo" actions integrated - a really important feature missing in Nautilus. I've been using it for a while and it works great!

Virtually any photo manager lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, and applying effects to your photos. But even powerful applications like digiKam and F-Spot can't really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For that you need a batch processing utility like Phatch.