With the resolution of today’s digital cameras and smartphone’s, the size of the photos taken can be massive. Some high quality cameras can output pictures at 6000 x 4000 pixels or more and the resulting file size can be several Megabytes. If you’re a fan of photo sharing websites or social networking and need to upload your photos to sites like Twitter or Facebook, trying to upload one huge picture is going to take enough time, but doing it with a whole holiday’s worth of snaps will take forever unless you have a fast internet connection. You also have to think of the people who are going to view or download these files. On anything but a reasonable internet connection, and a fast mobile device or respectable PC, it could be a rather painful affair.
The situation is also very similar for web developers and websites, because as well as taking the extra time to upload batches of larger images, how much space being taken up is also a consideration. I’m quite sure there would be a number of visitors to Raymond.cc who would not be too impressed if each page took minutes to load because it contained half a dozen high resolution screenshots! Keeping it reasonable is a must.
Of course, there are several other reasons why you would want to resize images or change the file format of a number of images or even entire folders. The good thing is, there are masses of free applications around that deal with the converting and manipulation of images and many of you will already have a favourite in mind. Fotosizer is a utility that caught my eye because it seems to have a good blend of usability and functions without being complicated to use.
As well as performing the resizing and conversion a number of different ways, the program can also change the image quality, alter the DPI settings, retain the EXIF and XMP metadata, and perform a few colour changing or rotating effects. Fotosizer is only a small download of around 1.6 Megabytes and although it doesn’t have a dedicated portable version, can be made portable by extracting the executable with 7zip.
Everything the program does is contained within the single window so ploughing through multiple windows to get tasks done is thankfully not needed. Adding images is simply a case of dragging and dropping all the required files and folders onto the window or using the add and remove buttons underneath.
The resize settings are pretty simple to understand. ‘Custom size/Percentage of original’ as the name suggests, allows you to set the desired resolution as an absolute pixel size or a percentage of the original size. ‘Preset size’ has a number of common sizes in the dropdown box including some for iPhone/iPod and Sony PSP. A couple of tick boxes like ‘Maintain aspect ratio’ and ‘Reverse width and height by orientation’ are there to safeguard against producing images out of proportion.
The three tabs under ‘Optional settings’ offer functions like turning the images into negative or black and white and rotating or flipping the images. The ‘Misc’ tab can change the percentage of the JPEG quality or the print DPI as well as turning on or off the retaining of any metadata in the original images.
The final area of the main window is for the output format and the destination folder with the option of customizing a filename mask. Fotosizer can save the files in BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG or TIFF formats. The destination folder can be set as the ‘Same as original’ or simply select a custom location.
The ‘Filename mask’ area is quite a useful little option because there are a total of ten different mask patterns you can enter into the box separated by any chosen combination of custom characters. Dates, automatic numbering, dimensions and filename are included along with a few presets in the dropdown box.
The process is pretty quick, enlarging 15 pictures from 1024 x768 to 1600 x 1200 and changing the format from JPG to PNG took under 10 seconds on a single core PC. Although Fotosizer is in a crowded area in regards to image editing software, it has a good mix of being powerful enough for most people and easy to use. There is much more powerful software out there, and Faststone Photo Resizer is one such program to check out if you require tons of functions. But more power often means less user friendliness which is why if Fotosizer does everything you want, it’s definitely one to have a look at.
Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7