Customizing photos can be fun for some users, but, just as well, is sometimes a necessity if you want to make pictures fit in an online album or you want to e-mail them. Changing the dimensions might imply something more than just simply adjusting the width and height. Keeping the proportions and the overall look just as good as the original might also be important.

Altarsoft Photo Resizer is a simple application that helps you resize images in just a few steps. The software is available in demo mode, a watermark will be added to your images. To remove this limitation you have to purchase the software for $ 24.95. You will be notified about this through a nag screen each time you open the application.

This tool keeps it all nice and simple. Everything you need to customize your images is right in the main window. The developer has focused on functionality and not on beauty, so you shouldn’t expect any fancy menus.

Once you’ve opened this application, you will surely observe that it is easy to understand and use. First off, you can select the source folder, with all its subfolders and the destination of the resulting files. You can add one image at a time, if you want to. Also, the Delete image and Clear options are available to help you with the management of the loaded photos. All these actions can be performed both with the help of the designated buttons in the taskbar or by using the File menu.

A preview will be displayed when selecting an image, showing the exact size in pixels. If you need a custom size, you will select Desktop size from the menu and then further adjust the resize options. You also have some predefined sizes (800x600, 320x240, 720x480) that might be useful. Next comes the % of source feature that will basically allow you to select the size of the newly created image as a percentage from the initial picture. For example, if you select 50%, the resulting image will have exactly half the size of the original image keeping, of course, the original ratio.

You can also select the height or width of the new photo with the help of the designed options. We should mention that all these changes are made preserving the ratio. So, you can’t change both the height and width, but just one of them, the other being automatically calculated so that your new picture won’t appear deformed.

Last, but not least, comes the max side option. Basically, this feature will allow you to select the value that you want the longest side of the image to have, whether we are talking about the width or height. Again, the ratio of the initial picture is kept. This might irritate some users but, for the beginners, the fact that you will get nice looking images every time is to be appreciated

Altarsoft Photo Resizer also offers a conversion option. You can select from quite a lot of image file types: BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TGA, TIFF, ICO, PCX that will most likely satisfy the needs of the average users.

The Rename section offers you three options to choose from: adding a number, the weight and height values, or the date. You can’t, however, rename the images without adding one of these three. This restriction comes to help you avoid file rewriting and, therefore, the loss of some important pictures. If you don’t enable this option your newly created images will have the exact name as the original.

The Settings window is quite small and doesn’t offer many customization options; only the selection of the JPG quality can be changed using a slider (from 0% to 100%). Some other options would have been useful, for example the option of automatically searching for updates or some optimizing features concerning the conversion function of this software.

All in all, Altarsoft Photo Resizer will help you resize your images fast and easy. The rename and convert features are also most welcomed, but some more adjusting options like customizing the colors or cropping, would have been helpful.

The Good

The best thing about this tool is that everything is kept simple, all the functions are being offered in one window, so the beginners will surely appreciate it. Also, the quite satisfying graphical formats that are supported and offered in the conversion section recommend it.

The Bad

One of the most irritanting things about this application is the fact that you can't customize the height and weight at the same time, so one of its strengths is also one of its weaknesses. You are limited to the predefined options and that might irritate the advanced users. It's clear to the eye that this application was developed for the ones that want to keep everything simple and don't need a complex image editing tool.

The Thruth

To sum it up, Altarsoft Photo Resizer is a program that gets the job done without much fuss. It’s obvious that advanced users will want something more, but for beginners it’s quite a deal. Of course, everything good can become better, like the image customization features, but in a nutshell it fulfills its primary goal: to resize images in just a few steps.



Here are some snapshots of the application in action: