See if ACDSee have an evaluation version of their Robo plugin. And if you like it and ACDSee, buy it. The plugin will also work with PicaView whicih is cheaper than ACDSee (but obviously not as feature rich).

You can see what it does on their website [ur]www.acdsystems.com[/url] - it has been what I consider the best and fastest image viewing applet for over 6 years.

And back onto expensive solutions... Photoshop can definitely do what you want. I'd never buy it for batch usage alone - that's something too specialized to spend that kind of money on.

You might also want to check out Debabelizer as I suggested earlier. It's all about conversion and batch manipulation.

Bruno