Pic Edit On The Go

The fast-moving world we live in often compels us to find the most practical and quick solutions to our needs in order to save time and do more with less. However, this is not the way to always solve problems because haste and diminished focus cause flaws to appear where one wouldn't expect them. Instead, you should go for the most reliable means of settling the matters without having to make any compromises in quality.

The same is true when software programs are involved, because the fastest working utility will not be the best choice for all things. Sacrificing a bit in terms of speed in favor of a high-end output is a better alternative because, even if you have to hold up some extra moments, but the results meet or even surpass your expectations, then it is well worth the wait. And where could this be more true than in the case of applications dealing with all sorts of multimedia content. Editing and converting movies, songs and pictures is something we've all done and will do in the future, so it's a good idea to stay informed about the most useful utilities for processing this type of files.

If photos are your poison, you must have gone through at least a dozen programs that would do management, editing, transformation, resizing and other such operations in order to make the digital images better looking and better fitting. There are so many tools one could use, that, without a bit of guidance, someone could either end up employing the wrong or the least useful apps, or even give up altogether. To help them pick the best instrument that will serve their purpose, the first tip is to search for free alternatives that, as one will discover, are often able to perform at the same level as their paid counterparts.

Such a piece of software is ImageBatch, a dedicated photo converter and resizer that has to offer a lot more than its name would suggest. Indeed, it has batch-processing capabilities, in fact this is the only way it will work, namely with folders instead of single files. The unembellished interface shouldn't drive you away from it because it has a quality not too frequently encountered among this kind of applications: it runs straight away after you unzip it. No need for installations, dependencies, plugins or similar things. It has all the necessary stuff in that little, 365 KB archive and that's something very difficult to match.

This application really keeps things simple, actually so simple that you won't even find a handful of buttons, there are only four and the same is true for drop-down menus. The practicality is, obviously, a predominant characteristic, but this does not obstruct the feature set at all, as the supported operations and their customizable settings are more than sufficient. The list of supported graphical formats is, in turn, a bit short: PNG, JPEG and GIF. This leaves out some commonly used and widely spread file types, such as BMP or TIFF, not to mention the fact that it only provides a quality configuration only for JPEG images.

The first task that ImageBatch can accomplish is the changing of the dimensions of your photos. This can be done in several ways and it's up to you to decide which one suits your needs best, depending on the situation. Thus, you will be able to resize all the pictures to the width and height you can manually insert in the corresponding fields. Another option is to proportionally alter the size of the images by having a fixed height or width you'll input.

Using this application, you can also customize the photos from a selected folder with your own watermark. This way, no one can claim ownership of your graphics and personalizing them can also enhance their good looks if you use this feature the right way. You are presented with two separate types of stamping, with text and image, respectively.

For the first case, you'll have to write the passage that you want to be displayed onto the pictures and format the font type, size and color. You will also be able to set a specific transparency level and watermark position onto the photos. The latter setting can be fine-tuned by picking the placement from center, left top or bottom and right top or bottom. There is still another attribute that you're allowed to configure: the vertical and horizontal offsets that will put the text marker further from the photo borders. Regarding the image watermark variant, all there is to say is that you'll be presented with similar options, namely opacity, position and offsets.

ImageBatch supplies you with another set of tools that are designed to make it easy for you to change the pictures' orientation. This can be done either by flipping them horizontally or vertically, or by rotating them. For this last mentioned feature, you can use three parameters for turning the graphical files 90, 180 or 270 degrees clockwise. Finally, the last operation you can use this utility for is cropping. In this case, you have the possibility to remove the outer regions of the photos by simply entering the desired offset parameters.

One last, but important, thing you should be aware of is that all the modifications you do will affect the original files, so it's highly advisable to back them up before so you can have them unaltered if you happen to get some unwanted results. This notice is included in the main window of the application, but an extra reminder can be useful here. The actual processing takes little time, under ten seconds for 36 JPEG files that have a combined size of just over 10 MB. The stress on the system resources is kept within reasonable limits with a peak of almost 16 MB of RAM out of the 2 GB available and a 45-percent usage of the 1.90 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor.

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