The real powertoy

Published by Vlasta on April 14th 2008.

Amazingly easy to use and surprisingly powerful. Picture Resizer started as a toy, but evolved into a something more. A flexible tool with unexpected features packed in a less than 300kB of data. Version 3.0 released today adds more of the good stuff.

Simplicity

Picture Resizer was designed to be usable by people with almost no computer skills. All you need to do is drag and drop files or folders on the tool’s icon. Target size can be specified by simply renaming the tool.

There are of course alternate ways. You can easily add one or more commands to Explorer context menu. There is also a 3rd party GUI that lets you pick the size in a dialog window.

Power

The tool is indeed powerful. Here is a list of things it does implicitly or when asked to. Can any other resizer do the same?

• Able to resize files in all subfolders.
• High quality coverage-based and gamma-aware resizing method.
• Multiple ways to specify target size: maximum width, height, larger side, smaller side or frame (keeps aspect ratio), specified width and height, specified percentage, maximum file size in kB, or by resolution (DPI)
• Configurable compression quality.
• Skip files smaller than the target size.
• Process files in parallel on multi-core processors (new in 3.0).
• Change aspect ratio while preserving shapes using seam carving (new in 3.0).
• Generate customized reports (for example html fragments) based on the processed files.
• Work with extra large images in a native 64-bit edition.
• Sharpen the resized images.

New in version 3.0

Version 3.0 is able to use multiple processors or multiple cores to resize multiple images in parallel.

Another and rater unique new feature is the ability to change aspect ratio (with the -g switch) of pictures using the image carving method. The method takes image content into account and removes least significant portions of the image first. It usually gives better results than cropping and is fully automated.

Note how the clouds are closer to each other on the right photo instead of being distorted by the aspect ratio change. This function is ideally suited to adjust large photos to your LCD display.

Resources

Download the Picture Resizer freeware tool from its homepage.