ImageMagick is an extremely useful piece of software. There are several interfaces (graphical, commandline and library), but I prefer the commandline.
Yes, there's plenty of websites who will strip off the EXIF flags after uploading your JPEG and thus show your pictures in the wrong orientation. ImageMagick has a nice option for this. It'll read out the EXIF orientation flag, then rotate the image in the old-fashioned way:
$ convert candelabra.jpg -auto-orient candelabra_rotated.jpg
I often have a need to concatenate a number of images and create them as one image. Montage is wonderful for this:
$ montage -geometry +0+0 -tile 1x2 image1.png image2.png montage.png
This will place the image1 above image2 (i.e. in a column). Thus 1x2 means, create a montage of 1 pictures wide and 2 pictures in height.
(So what I actually use it for, is to use VLC to save two scenes from a movie, then put it on Facebook...)
If you need to resize images to a certain size, you'll probably need to retain the width/height ratio. This is where the extent parameter comes in:
$ convert -resize 250x50 -gravity center -extent 250x50 -background none \
logo-home.png logo-home_small.pngIn the above case, the background is set to none (i.e. transparent), but defaults to white.
To keep an image at the same size, but just pad it in a border of transparent pixels to get a touchable area of 50x50 pixels:
$ convert small_button.png -gravity center -background none -extent 50x50 small_button_padded.png
The correct parameters to convert a color scan of some handwritten notes to black & white:
$ convert notes.jpg -monochrome -colors 2 notes_bw.jpg
For background information: https://poizan.dk/blog/2014/02/28/monochrome-images-in-imagemagick/
To strip EXIF data from an image:
$ mogrify -strip image.jpg