Some image-related tasks are so simple that they are not worth the effort of launching a full-blown photo editor to carry them out. In some cases there isn’t even the possibility to process the items in batches.
CoolTweak is an easy solution for those that need to resize, watermark or publish photos online without having to launch an image editor. It carries the tasks in the background and after the job is done, all the items are stored in a user-defined folder automatically.
Special about this application is that it creates a context menu in Windows Explorer, which contains all the actions it can carry out. Thus, applying a watermark on a picture or resizing it is just a matter of right-clicking it and choosing the desired command.
[admark=1]Installing is not a complicated task, but in our case it took a while to complete because CoolTweak requires Microsoft’s .NET 4.0 to function. If you don't have Microsoft .NET Framework already installed on your computer, CoolTweak automatically downloads and installs the files.
However, the entire procedure increases the overall installation time of the application significantly. In our case, the wait for downloading the necessary files was pretty evident.
The main application window (the editor) is accessible from Windows context menu, regardless of the file. Right-clicking on an image, though, provides all the functions available in CoolTweak: resize to specific values, add watermark or share it online on Facebook, Picasa or Twitter.
By default, the settings for all these options are predefined by the developer but you can edit them as well as create new entries that better feed your needs.
The contextual menu editor is built intuitively and allows you to configure resizing and watermark (both work with BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG and TIF) options, which can be carried out in the background.
For online sharing (GIF, JPG and PNG formats supported) you need to log into your Facebook, Picasa or Twitter account. The credentials are saved by default for connecting quickly next time. All personal data can be cleared from the general configuration menu of the application.
Configuration is easy to carry out, especially since you do not have to start from scratch because the application permits copying and pasting the menus from one location to another. This enables you to make minor modifications to the predefined settings and should not take more than a minute.
In the case of image resizing, you have the possibility to define the width and height values in various measurement units: pixel, millimeter, inch, percent, pica, dot or twip; despite the rich number of choices, most users will stick to one of the first four choices.
The application also provides a preview of how the image will be processed and offers three resizing modes; fixed size, resize to best fit in a fixed rectangle and resize to fully fit a fixed rectangle. With the last one the original proportions are preserved, but the resulting output may be cropped.
Additional settings let you impose some restrictions, such as preventing upscaling or downscaling the images so that no action is taken if the item is smaller or larger than the defined frame. Before saving your configuration, you can test all the settings.
As far as watermarking is concerned, CoolTweak supports both text and image. The options available refer to the position of the mark (you can use the presets provided by the developer and define horizontal and vertical margins) and opacity level and rotation angle.
CoolTweak can automatically move the processed files to a specific location as well as rename them. Additionally, the application can also move the original files to a different location or rename them. To keep the results in order, the folder structure can be preserved for the new files. These settings are available for both resizing and watermarking menus.
The program proved to be quite stable during our testing. The only trouble we ran into was temporary and consisted in failure to resize the image. However, recreating the menu proved to be a successful solution.
System resources used when processing the data were within reasonable limits, even when we fed it a larger amount of files.