14 DAY TRIAL // There's a wide range of graphical editors available on the software market today and it has become a really difficult task to choose the one appropriate for your needs. If you need a small application that performs the basic photo editing operations, try Lonking Software's Picture Resize Genius!
From its name, you can certainly figure out the main feature of the application, but Picture Resize Genius can do much more than resizing your images. You can also batch rename your pictures, add a text watermark or convert them to several formats.
Picture Resize Genius's installer is less than 2 MB, so you won't have to worry about your disk space. Also, the installing process is very intuitive. You have the option of placing a shortcut of the application on your desktop, in the Quick launch bar, or both making it easily accessible.
Picture Resize Genius provides a very easy to use interface, by placing all the available actions and features on a side bar and grouping them into three major categories: Files, Actions and Tools.
The first step in running the program is the selection of the images that you want to process. You can do that either by manually choosing the files to load or by opening an entire folder on your disk. Surely, when you add a folder to the image list, only the recognized image formats will be loaded into your processing list. You can, of course, remove any of the images from the list by selecting it and choosing the 'Remove Selected' feature or clear the list of pictures with 'Remove all'.
In the bottom left corner of the application, you can permanently see the number of files in your current image list. All these files will be processed by Picture Resize Genius according to the custom options you define.
As I was saying, the main purpose of the application is resizing your pictures. This can be very useful if you want to send them by e-mail, upload them on a website or if you simply want to save some disk space. You can customize the resize process by manually setting the width and height of the pictures, but you can choose to take only one of these dimensions into consideration, or even crop a portion of the image. The list of filters that you can apply to your pictures includes Triangle, Hermite, Spline, Linear, Mitchell and more.
When you're done with the customization of the picture resize process, you can add a text watermark on all your images. Also, this feature provides you with several options that you can adjust, like the text position, the rotation angle and the transparency level. Also, you can select the font size, style and color you prefer.
Another basic action of Picture Resize Genius is the batch file rename. You can select the appropriate template for your image names, by using the # mark to specify positions for the numeric enumerator. The application also offers a set of macros, allowing you to add some items to your new filename: the original name, the original extension and different formats of the current date and time.
The final step before starting the batch image processing allows you to adjust the output settings according to your needs and preferences. There are 7 output formats that you can choose from and for each of them you can set the most important characteristic: the quality level for .jpg, the number of colors for .bmp, or the compression level for .png. You can also specify the destination folder for the resulted files and whether or not to update the files' date and time.
If you don't need all the functions of Picture Resize Genius, you can disable any of them from the corresponding configuration panel. For example, if you don't want to rename the resulted files, all you have to do is uncheck the 'I want to rename my pictures' checkbox.
Picture Resize Genius includes a Picture Editor that provides the basic photo editing functions, including Rotate, Flip, Zoom and Adjust Contrast. The program keeps logs of its activity, allowing you to monitor all the processing actions that took place from the first run of Picture Resize Genius.
The Good
Thanks to its simple and intuitive interface, Picture Resize Genius is suited for any user who only needs the basic photo editing features. It is able to perform batch resize and rename operations on thousands of files in a matter of seconds.
The Bad
Picture Resize Genius only allows you to add a text watermark. A very useful improvement to this feature would be the possibility to also add image watermarks.
Another thing that I encountered while testing Picture Resize Genius was the fact that the transparency level is quite the opposite of what it should be. To me it seems normal that if the transparency level of an image is 100, that image should be invisible. Still, the producers of Picture Resize Genius have a different opinion, showing a completely opaque image when the transparency level is set to 100. Maybe that option in the watermark configuration panel should be called Opacity.
The Truth
This application is very easy to use, has an intuitive user interface and does its job very well. Still, due to the existence of many free professional tools for graphic editing, I can't say that Picture Resize Genius is worth its price. You can still give it a try and take advantage of the 5-day fully functional trial.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
