I love programs that do only one thing but then do that one thing extremely well. Here is one such program.
Almost every image editing program includes the capability to resize images. So why would you want still another program that performs the same function? Convenience.
Let's say that you have a picture you took with a high-resolution camera, and you would like to place that image on your web site or send it to someone by e-mail. One problem: the image is two megabytes in size or even more. Maybe you have a dozen such images you wish to upload or e-mail.
Get a stopwatch and start timing yourself as you open your favorite photo editor, find the menu item to load your image, click through the various subdirectories until you find the image you want, load it into the editing program, find the command for resizing, determine the size of the new image, resize it, and then save the image(s) in an appropriate place on your hard drive.
How long did that take?
If you had the Image Resizer Powertoy Clone installed on your hard drive, you could have performed the same function within seconds. This free Windows program quickly resizes pictures without opening an image editor. It adds an option to the Windows Explorer context (right-click) menu.
To use this program, you use Windows Explorer to find the image(s) you wish to convert. It will convert one image at a time or many. You simply right-click the file name of one or more pictures, select Resize Pictures, and choose the resolution you want to resize the images to. The newly resized images will show up alongside the file name of the originals. You then select SAVE.
The total time required will be four or five seconds when converting a single image on most computers. Simultaneously converting many images will take a bit longer.
Bulk Image Resizer supports all the popular image formats, including JPEG, JPG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TIFF, and PNG among others, and it does so without any limitation on file size.
Other features include:
- Converts multiple files from multiple locations at once
- Ability to specify new width or new height
- Ability to force a specific width/height combination
- Keep aspect ratio or skew image
- High quality, distortion-less resizing algorithm
- Support for popular formats including JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF
- Multi threaded to take advantage of multi core CPUs
- Resize unlimited number of files of unlimited quality
- Ability to rename files with a prefix or suffix
- Ability to overwrite original image or specify a new location
- Specify JPEG compression quality to further reduce filesize for photos
- Drag and drop functionality for quick image queuing
- Full UI themes
- FreeImage codec library
- Automated updater
This is a new and improved clone of the original Image Resizer Powertoy. The original program worked only on Windows XP not on Vista. Even on XP, it only worked on the 32-bit version of Windows XP. The new Image Resizer Powertoy Clone works on Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/XP/2000/2003/Vista/Windows 7, including 64-bit versions, where available.
The Image Resizer Powertoy Clone is available free of charge but is only for Windows. It is open source software, and even the source code is available free of charge. You can read more about it or download the program at http://www.codeplex.com/PhotoToysClone.
