Command line tools every creative should know, and what each one replaces

Converting one file is easy in any application. Converting two hundred is an afternoon of clicking, and it is the same afternoon every time the situation recurs.

This is the whole argument. Not that the command line is better, but that it does the same thing to two hundred files as to one, and that difference compounds across a career.

What follows is a small set, chosen because each one replaces a task creatives actually do repeatedly. Learn one at a time, when you next hit the problem it solves.

Transcode a folder to proxies. One loop, and the machine works while you do something else.

for f in *.mov; do
  ffmpeg -i "$f" -vf scale=1280:-2 -c:v h264 \
         -crf 23 "proxies/${f%.mov}.mp4"
done

Extract frames at an interval or at detected shot changes — the basis of any footage-logging workflow.

Trim without re-encoding, using stream copy, which is instant and lossless.

Strip or extract audio, for handing a track to someone or replacing one.

Alongside it, ffprobe reads duration, resolution, frame rate, codec and timecode from any file without opening it.

rsync — copying that can be interrupted and resumed, that verifies, and that only transfers what changed. The correct tool for ingesting a card or backing up a project.

find — locate files by name, size, age or type across a tree. 'Every file over 2GB not touched in a year' is one line.

du and ncdu — where the disk went. Reliably surprising.

shasum — verify that a copy matches the original before deleting the source. Two minutes against the alternative of finding out later.

ImageMagick resizes, converts, crops and composites in batch. Preparing a set for web, generating thumbnails, converting a folder of formats — all single commands.

magick mogrify -path web/ -resize 2000x -quality 86 *.jpg

exiftool reads and writes image metadata. Useful for stripping location data before publishing, for reading capture settings across a shoot, and for renaming a folder of files by their capture date.

That last one solves a recurring annoyance in a single command, and it is usually what convinces people the tool is worth knowing.

Test on one file first. Always. Run the command on a single copy, check the result, then apply it to the folder. The discipline costs thirty seconds and prevents the version of the mistake that affects two hundred files.

Never write over the source. Output to a new directory. Disk is cheap and an in-place operation that goes wrong has no undo.

Where a tool offers a dry-run option, use it. rsync in particular will tell you exactly what it would do, which is worth reading before letting it do it.

Trying to learn these systematically fails, because there is too much surface and none of it is memorable without a use.

Instead, the next time you face a repetitive media task, spend ten minutes finding the command rather than an hour clicking. You will remember it, because it is attached to a problem you had.

Keep the ones that work in a file with a note on what each does. After a year that file is a small personal toolkit, built entirely out of afternoons you did not spend.