Digital Photo Scaler

No one is a complete stranger when it comes to working with images as we all took pictures with digital cameras, mobile phones or any similar device and then had to transfer them for viewing, printing or sharing. Sometimes when the stills are not quite what we expect of them, a bit of editing is indispensable and we call in the experts.

They are not necessarily our IT-savvy friends or paid professionals but simple software programs that anyone can use. The plethora of graphic tools out there means that the less techie users can deploy powerful instruments with minimal knowledge as soon as they can find an easy-to-understand and use utility that is made just for the job at hand.

As always, discovering the appropriate application that will meet your needs and requirements is of utmost importance because thusly you will be able to minimize the time allocated for completing the processing and get the best results altogether. When it comes to working with graphical files, there are many good apps you can turn to and the majority of them can be found as freeware, which is a great quality.

This is the case of SNS-Resizer, a lightweight piece of software designed to provide you with a simple means of changing the dimensions of your photos, adding frames and personalizing them with watermarks while having to pay nothing for the job.

This utility barely tips the scale with just over 850 KB and doesn't sport an interface like most of the tools you have probably used so far. This program works by means of dragging and dropping the pictures onto its icon and requires no installation. When you double click the executable, you open the configuration tab from where you can effortlessly customize the options for the processing profile. There is a live preview for using a sample photo so you can get a general idea on how the end result will look if certain functions are activated and employed.

The first thing you can modify when accessing the SNS-Configurator is the name you want to give to the current settings. If you use this piece of software long enough, you will find it easier to create and save several profiles that can be later employed for various processing tasks particularly if you become acquainted (and even familiar) with the ''Send to'' Windows menu.

There is a special section in this menu of SNS-Resizer that gives you the possibility to integrate all the configurations you create into the above mentioned context menu. This means that you can simply select as many images as you like and transform them all at once with literally a couple of clicks.

Setting up the resizing parameters is an easy job. All you have to do is input the scaling method, target size and quality. To detail on this, there are six different ways of changing the dimensions of the images starting with a different reference point: the longer or the shorter photo edge, as well as the width or length. Besides, you can choose to scale the graphical files based on the frame or screen sizes and in both cases, you can manually enter the values in pixels for the output pictures.

As previously stated, another factor taken into consideration is the quality that comes with four preset rates, namely Low, Medium, High and Best. They are expressed in percents and reported to the originals so their corresponding numeric proportions are 50, 75, 90 and 100 percent.

In the ''Processing'' sector, this application will offer you a number of extra options related to the actual handling of the files. Hence, you can activate a filter that makes the software skip the smaller ones or opt for the inclusion of all the subdirectories in order to have all the images transformed.

With SNS-Resizer, you also get to keep the EXIF or metadata that accompanies your digital photographs. For saving the pictures, the default action is to store them in the same location with the source files but you can act otherwise. What you can do with the resulting images is keep them in a separate folder that can be created in the program's own directory or have them put in the same place as the master copies but in separate containers saving the subdirectories’ structure.

There are three more additional elements that can be inserted onto the customized pics and the first is the date the picture was taken on. Here, you can pick a favorite color and font size, as well as the positioning of this information and the desired transparency level.

Another thing you can add is a nice frame, for which you can pick a width between 1 and 99, a specific color and, again, the transparency value from a scale up to 9. To further personalize the photos, you are enabled to introduce a watermark that consists of another image that needs to be in PNG format. The only thing you can tinker with here is the placement of the stamp.

As soon as you finish configuring all the needed parameters, you can save the profile and even make a copy of it in the form of a separate EXE file. You will notice that each time you activate a feature, the name of the original application will change because every function used adds a code in order to individualize the profile. If you want the default values reinstated, simply rename the executable as it originally was when you downloaded it: SNS-Resizer-800.exe.

Another important thing you should keep in mind is that while the software recognizes and batch processes BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG and TIF file types, the final result will always arrive in the JPG format. While running at full speed, the utility will put your resources under a bit of stress, especially the processor. During our tests, on a Dual-Core Athlon 64 X2 at 1.90 GHz, the CPU load peaked at 97 % with a constant RAM usage of over 20 MB.

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