14 DAY TRIAL // Pictures are an important part of our lives. Whether we're talking about photos from our last vacation or just some images we've seen on the Internet, we store pictures on our hard-drive. Every once in a while we like to share some of them with friends or family and creating online albums is one of the most popular methods for doing that.
The tricky thing is that images forming such online collections need to follow certain specifications and this is where Aoao Photo Resizer can come to the rescue. The tool not only helps you resize images in just a few simple steps, but also offers some interesting image customization features, all for a price of $19.90.
No special requirements need to be met in order to use this application so, it should work on any average computer. It can be used in demo mode, but until a license is purchased, a watermark will be added to each of the customized images.
In order to begin using it, the images you want resized need to be selected. This can be accomplished by either adding them one by one, or loading a whole folder at once. The drag and drop functionality is also supported and random images can be selected by keeping CTRL pressed while clicking on the ones that interest you.
Once this operation is done, you can rotate the images, remove a certain photo or clear the whole list if you've made a mistake. An useful feature that you can use is the picture sorting by file name, type, size or date/time.
When it comes to image customization, the first thing to mention is the Adjust tab which houses several options like lightness, contrast, saturation. Their respective values can be altered by dragging a slider with you mouse. The picture's colors can be balanced in a similar fashion by manipulating the color sliders (cyan, red, magenta green, yellow or blue). Various filters like mosaic, wave noise or gray scale can also be applied to the image. All these will allow you to add a personal touch to the photos.
The Add Frame tab enables the addition of textures, patterns or simple outerlines to images. Each of these three elements can be altered to meet your needs. The texture's appearance can be adjusted by selecting the type (rectangle, ellipse or diamond), size or opacity. An inner line with customizable width and color can also be added. The pattern can be modified by changing the X and Y offset values, the background color, the opacity and the quality. Adjusting the outer line involves modifying the line width, the frame width and the color.
The Crop tab allows you to select a part of the image that interests you. You can use two types of cropping: pels and percentage. Regardless of the chosen method the application will offer information about the size and proportion settings that are applied.
Last, but not least, the Resize tab can be used to select the output size for the altered image. One of the interesting features available on this tab is the constrain proportion option, which allows keeping the aspect ratio of the initial picture. Some predefined sizes, such as small (160x120), medium (320x240) or D4 (1440x1024) are offered under the Standard size menu.
Predefined proportions, like 1:1, 4:3 or 16:9 are also available. And, if you want to use an interpolation method, you can choose one of the three offered by the application: smooth, sharpen or sawtooth. The software allows saving all customizations made to an image as a profile for later use.
Another feature worth mentioning is the image Preview, which is available on all tabs. If you want to better analyze the picture customizations, use the zoom options or even select the full screen view. In the Parameter window just select and configure the GIF animation output. There are three options to choose from here - adapt palette, optimize palette and color jitter.
This tool offers quite a few image customization options in addition to the traditional resize. You can easily add frames or patterns to your pictures, certain filters to improve their quality and save all settings for future use. The price might be too steep from some users, but overall this is quite a handy program.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
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