Transform Photos in a Snap

Creating online albums and sending images as e-mail attachments or via social network services often entail transforming the pictures. For resizing and changing the original file format, Smith Image Converter can fit the bill.

Sharing treasured moments captured on a digital camera may need, sometimes, more than a simple transfer from a memory card to the hard drive or onto other storage devices. In fact, displaying your pictures online frequently implies a bit of editing, mainly to reduce their physical size to better accommodate the requirements of various services you use.

With the abundance of such utilities out there, it's mainly a matter of getting your hands on a tool that has enough features and processing power to get the job done fast, still without cutting corners, especially when it comes to quality. Smith Image Converter answers these demands and, best of all, will do all the work for free.

The application comes neatly tucked in an archive and unzipping it is all you need to do before getting down to business, because it travels with all the dependencies for running seamlessly, no installation necessary. This means that you'll be able to take it with you, on a memory stick, for example, and edit the pictures regardless of your whereabouts.

At first glance, the user interface looks better than those of many similar programs, but it has its flaws. For instance, the white font used to describe the commands is hard to read in some places. Also, there are a few misspellings that become bothersome to look at if you use the software more than a couple of times.

Adding the files to the task list is as straightforward as it gets: you have the alternative of manually selecting the images or loading an entire directory. If you go for the latter option, you can activate the feature that searches and includes pictures stored in subfolders as well.

A nifty addition is the possibility to also display the image size in pixels, but this will tremendously slow down the process, particularly when high-resolution photos are involved. If at any time you find yourself unsatisfied with the choice you've made, removing items from the list is a breeze. You can pick out individual files or simply clear them all in one fell swoop.

The next step in the whole process reveals yet another drawback, this time related to the supported graphical formats. Smith Image Converter can only deal with three of them, namely BMP, JPEG and PNG. They may be the most widespread types, but there are some that even the novice user will come across, like GIF or TIFF, and may need to modify.

It's time now to take a closer look at the advanced settings to see what this utility can do for you and first off is picture resizing. You have five options at your disposal to change the dimensions of the selected files. There are no built-in presets so you'll have to manually input the values, whether you prefer a custom size for both width and height or wish to adjust the images according to only one of the parameters.

Should you choose not to waste any time writing any numbers whatsoever, there's a slider you can use and set the new size as a percentage of the source images. It ranges from 1 to 100 and if you click the bar you can get it to move in increments of 5%, so there are plenty of ways to refine the output and make it look exactly as you think it should.

Speaking of end results, the next tab is designed to assist you in deciding the best location to put the new arrivals in. Thusly, you can keep the original directory as final destination or browse for a new one. The other option you'll find in this window of the settings area, if activated, will remove the old photos after the job is done, so you must use it with caution.

Another feature, that is quite useful for any type of conversion you may perform, is the renaming of the output files. With this tool you will be able to add prefixes and suffixes, choose the starting number and even specify how many digits you want to add to the filename. However, the available customizations stop here, leaving things a tad unfinished. At least a text replacing function would be expected to complete this section to some extent.

In the last advanced settings module you can configure the quality for JPEG pictures. Smith Image Converter offers you another slider that will enable you to adjust the degree of compression you wish to apply to the digital photographs. Of course, the best quality means leaving the pictures as they are, but you have to compromise in this respect if you are out of options for getting a smaller size on disk for the images.

Now if you're interested on how the application impacts on the system while running full-speed, the numbers are interesting. If the processing time is rather short, which is good, the resource usage can be impressive, but not in a positive way. So for a batch of over 160 files that weighed in at 150 MB the RAM employed peaked at a staggering 341 MB of the 2GB available. Meanwhile, the load on the dual-core 1.9 GHz AMD Athlon 64-bit processor exceeded 50% a few times.

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