Get Your 'Pics' on Route 66

Tired of waiting for images to load while photo sharing with someone over the internet? Need to quickly show to your friends the latest pictures taken on holiday or at the graduation party? Or maybe you just want to update your messenger avatar and need to crop your smiling face from a high sized group photo? If time is not your best friend in such rushing moments, I say you definitely need a fast application that can solve this problem immediately.

Image Sizer - as the title itself says - is a helpful software which knows not only to resize, compress, rotate or crop your images, but also to adjust image brightness, contrast and color schemes. You may apply a large variety of preset photo effects, reduce red-eyes and add watermarks to your images. Using the WYSIWYG technology, Image Sizer fits well into your image editing requests, as it shows great compliance in working with so many image file types. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get and is an editing system which displays in real time a content that is very similar to the final quality of the modified file. This way, you won't be having too many surprises concerning the output quality of the image that you are editing.

Featuring a main ribbon menu bar, just like the one that you have probably seen on the Office 2007's new look, Image Sizer appears in a stylish, but yet efficient interface. On the main screen, you can see a permanent left sidebar that displays compared information about the original and the modified image file. This way, no matter how many changes you apply to the image, you will be permanently informed about the dimensions, size on disk and transfer speed of the edited file.

The Basic, Advanced and Additional menu bars are efficiently distributing the available instruments of Image Sizer and if you only want to apply basic image transformation, you don't have to waste time wandering along a complicated toolbar and not finding the appropriate instrument. I think that this is one feature that makes Image Sizer unique. Having a well organized worksheet makes you work more efficiently, so, according to the WYSIWYG principle, you really get both what you see and what you need.

Even if many have reached the conclusion that functionality must overcome a product's look, I personally think that Image Sizer fulfils both qualities in the same way. Its efficiency in handling more than one file at the same time, the provided transfer speed information, which helps you choose the best image quality for web publishing, works hand in hand with the pretty and versatile interface. And what's even nicer about the interface is the fact that you may select one from five available skins which still, are not the only way to set your working space. If you can't get accustomed to the ribbon displaying mode, you can switch back to the classical interface which is more familiar to many people's habits in using a Windows application.

I guess speaking about functions and appearance would be enough for now. What needs to be mentioned, too, is the Options menu. Here, you can choose to adjust four main categories of options: the General and Default ones, as well as the options about watermark adding and FTP uploading. While many similar applications include by default their main function in the Windows Explorer actions list of a certain type of files, for Image Sizer you may select whether you like to activate this or not. Another good thing is that you can allow multiple instances of Image Sizer and you can also select to remember the main screen and location, which in many cases, is quite helpful.

As with the Watermark adding, Image Sizer lets you define up to 5 different watermark IDs that you will be able to apply on your images. You can choose from Black, White, Multicolor or Blank watermark types, or you can set a personalized one in which to include the photo Exif and a custom text entered by you. In this way, you can add copyright to all the images that you share with or show to other people.

Let's not forget that the main reason for which Image Sizer has got my attention is not the image editing and adjustment abilities, but the transfer optimizations that it can perform according to very precise parameters. Even if this feature consists of simply displaying one single panel, the information that it shows is very useful. Image Sizer only needs to know the size of your image file, and by calculating the original file and the compressed file's transfer speed at a series of default connection speeds, it will show a comparative chart that will make you see the difference between the compressed and uncompressed file transfer. This way, you'll never encounter difficulties in transferring image files, as Image Sizer will always calculate the best compressing configuration for you.

The Good

As I mentioned before, a good thing about Image Sizer is its versatility and the fact that it can manage so many image file types, from jpeg to dib and from psp to rpf.

Another important thing in depicting the good parts of Image Sizer is that it doesn't apply any nag 'demo' or 'trial' watermarks on the exported image. That is what many trial applications of this kind do and that's why, even if I don't like to say this too much, I prefer to test the software for a smaller period of time, but with fully functional features.

The Bad

One small, but relevant fact that could be disappointing - I don't know about you, but I sure find it difficult to allow this - is the uncomfortable management of the zoom control. You can't really zoom the original image unless you resize it; still, resizing the image doesn't lose any of the original quality, as you may shrink or enlarge the image as many times as you want before saving.

The Truth

I must admit that I can hardly accept the fact that after less than 10 days this program will be unusable, as I am just starting to enjoy it more and more with each image that I test. And yet, I guess that it's Image Sizer's friendly interface that keeps me so attached to it.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: