This post is especially for all those brave souls out there who are running Windows Vista, until recently I too was a pioneer of this brave new world of funky GUI and fatal flaws, I gave up last week and removed Vista from the last PC here in my home that had it installed.
Now, in the few months I ran Vista on my main work laptop (ASUS G2S), I discovered one really crazy omission from the system, namely a way to resize images easily. You can select an image in windows explorer, email it to yourself and resize it before it is sent, but lets face it, that’s a really long winded and stupid way of resizing a picture.
Windows Live Gallery does allow photo resizing, but it is not part of the OS and quite frankly I don’t like it very much, so I started searching for an alternative.
I found Fotosizer, which is a really cool utility for resizing and converting images in batches.
As you can see from the screenshot, it is a very basic software application, all it does is resize photos and optionally convert their format on output. Basic stuff yes, but it does it so well! I had a huge (60GB) collection of images taken on my Canon D40 digital SLR that have needed resizing for months, I only now just got this done as it was so easy using Fotosizer.
You can choose standard sizes for the conversion, or you can specify a custom size, you can also choose to overwrite these settings if an image has been rotated and apply them the opposite way around. A major bonus is the conversion on output section, this is great if you want to change the format of the image at the same time as resizing it.
Overall this is a really useful little application, definitely doubly so if you run Vista, ok most graphic applications such as Photoshop allow batch resizing, but it requires some effort to set up the processing and it takes a while to do, Fotosizer is a snap to use, you can set up a batch to process in seconds.
The actual conversion and resize process is quite swift, I had the software resize over 3000 images for me in one batch, it took around 12 minutes to achieve this in total, including setting up the batch process itself, which is quite a respectful speed for such a lot of image manipulation.
Anyone looking for a simple application to manipulate images, resize them and change their storage format would do well to take a look at this free little application that does the job so elegantly, definitely something I will be adding to my list of applications to be installed every time I reformat my drive in the future.
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