14 DAY TRIAL // Fast and accurate processing of digital imagery is the main objective not only for professionals but also for regular home users who need to manage a significant number of pictures. The modifications that can be made to photos or other kinds of graphical files are many and some can be performed simultaneously for entire batches of images. The most necessary could be resizing because there are numerous services or basic requirements like sharing precious moments over the Internet with distant friends that demand fixed and often smaller picture sizes than the originals.
Since there is a substantial assortment of software programs that can work with loads of photos at a time to give you the opportunity of quickly shaping them into the desired look, the difference can be easily done by analyzing the price, speed and quality. In other words, what you want is something inexpensive that can save you time and preserve as much as possible from the attributes of the selected source files. A little tool that meets these requirements is RPictureResize. The first thing that catches attention is its being friendly to anyone's wallet because nothing is more affordable than a free product, which is the case of this application. Add to that the fact that it doesn't require installation so you can carry it around on a memory stick or any similar device.
This utility will not daze you with a glamorous interface, far from it; you'll get a single window with the essential buttons and check boxes to help you reach your goal in record time. Because the program itself is very small, things are so much simplified that there is a single menu where you can find an option to change the language, currently only English and Traditional Chinese being available. However, things are rather organized in the main tab thanks to the focus on functionality that was obviously the main aim of this piece of software.
The first step you must take is to designate the target folder, the location of the files you want to convert. This can be easily done by pressing the ''Scan'' button that will let you explore your computer and pick the directory. All the photos that are contained in there will automatically be added to the processing list, so you need to be careful and move from that spot any files you want to leave out. RpictureResize recognizes and handles the most commonly used image file types that include JPG, BMP, PNG and GIF.
You can now move onto the next phase that involves customizing the resize settings for the task at hand. This implies making a choice and deciding on a single option out of the two that are available: fixed width or height on the one hand and thumbnail sized pictures on the other. The dimension is defined only in pixels and for the first case, the default setting is 480, regardless of the picture side, whereas for the thumbs, it is 100 and here it refers to the width. You don't have to worry about the aspect ratio because it is automatically preserved, so you're free to input any value you see fit in the pixel box.
The final step before the actual conversion will take place enables you to determine how the output photos will be saved. More precisely, you can opt for overwriting the original images and replacing them with the newly resized ones or you can let the source files untouched and store the modified pictures to another location. This place can host a new folder inside the target directory but just as well you'll be able to assign any other available container. It's worth mentioning here that RpictureResize is able to show you the total number of files that are available for conversion and also the size on disk occupied by these photos. Also note that from the preview area that lists the detailed information about the images, you can arrange them by size or by path, with the default ordering being after the file name.
As soon as all the configurations are made, you can press the ''Resize'' button and activate the process. During the actual operation, the main window doesn't display a progress bar, it just freezes. In the background, however, the wheels turn and they turn fast because downsizing a batch of 279 images with a total size of 23 MB to thumbnail dimensions took a mere 22 seconds. For a set of 66 pictures that weighed in at over 94 MB, the timer stopped at 57 seconds on the same testing computer that features 2GB of RAM and a 1.90 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor. The stress put on the system resources affected mostly the CPU with a load that peaked at 51%, while the maximum memory usage was around 35 MB.
The Truth
To sum up, it's safe to say RpictureResize offers good performance and gets the job done pretty fast. The feature pack is sufficient to help you modify the dimensions of many images of different types at once and even though it is rough on the edges and lacks some options that are present in similar utilities, this little app can come in handy, as you will find out if you give it a go. Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
This article is also available in Spanish: Cambia el tamaño de tus fotos
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