Photo Converter

Photo Converter is an application mainly developed for image file type conversion, offering support for popular formats, such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, ICO, EMF, TIF, TGA, BMP and PCX. It also sports a few types of photo adjustments and effects, including resize, rotate and watermark.

Before proceeding any further, you should know that this is an old tool no longer available for purchase. Although the demo edition doesn't have a time limitation attached, it automatically saves images as grayscale.

It's packed in a user-friendly interface made from a large window with a neatly organized structure, and it has a batch conversion mode. By default, the program applies the Old Fashion effect to the opened picture.

The other available effects, called templates, are Dream, Crystal, Shadow, Frame, and Demo. Any of them can be set as the default from the templates manager.

As far as the image tweaks are concerned, you can resize the files to a preset or custom dimension, crop, rotate or flip them, add text watermarks and place them anywhere on the images, as well as add one of the built-in borders and customize settings when it comes to the mask and background color, border, and shadow. The color balance can be adjusted for the brightness, contrast or RGB channels, as well as negative or greyscale mode.

If you want to convert a single picture into another format, all you have to do is save it to a custom directory by entering a new file name and selecting a format.

In batch conversion mode, you can import as many files as you want to the task list, pick the preferred output format and saving folder, add a prefix and/or suffix to the original file name, change the file name case, rotate images, as well as enable auto-crop and choose a ratio.

The utility carried out batch conversion jobs swiftly in our tests, without triggering the OS to hang, crash or prompt error messages. It left a small footprint on system resources usage.

On the other hand, we're certain that Photo Converter is confusing to the first-time user, especially when trying to make conversions without configuring settings beforehand.

For instance, if you don't want to apply any of the image effects, it's necessary to access the templates manager and disable whichever template is the default, to make sure all templates are greyed out. If you remove any template, you cannot put it back, which means that you have to reinstall the application.

If you convert the files without making any changes to their size, you'll see that the new items have a different resolution. We originally thought this was a bug. However, this happens because, for each opened picture, Photo Converter sets its default size to the user-defined maximum size (480 pixels) from its list of resize options (instead of the original size).

The bad news is that the program cannot remember this option when exiting, which means that you have to access the resize panel to change settings every time you want to convert files (even in batch conversions), or open the next image with the current settings.

Photo Converter is an old application. Although it comes with a decent set of options, the default configuration and lack of general configuration settings make it difficult to work with.