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If you have a bunch of photos shot at a huge 10 megapixels (and thus the huge file size) that you want to quickly share with your friends and family via email, Facebook etc., and if you are too lazy to fire up a slow-loading-and-complex image manipulation application, Image Resizer is possibly the best solution for you.

Image Resizer is an evolved product from the Image Resizer Powertoy Clone (which we have covered previously) by Brice Lambson, which allow the user to resize images with just a few clicks. Once it is installed, it sits comfortably in your right click context menu (only when you right click on images), and it is always ready for your resizing command.

How does it work?

Fairly simple. Just select all images, right click on them, and click Resize Pictures. Select your desired resolution (I suggest 1024×768 which is best balanced between quality and size for quick sharing, unless you want to share higher quality photos), click OK, and you are basically done.

2011-04-21 20h58_39

However, you still have several advanced options to choose from if it’s needed.

Only shrink pictures – This option will only make the image smaller, not bigger. It means that if the original image is smaller than the resize scale, Image Resizer will not resize it.

Replace the originals – This option will directly resize the original image, without having the resized copy of it. Useful when you have to resize the images that are not meant to be kept in its original size.

What’s new since we last covered?

Currently the latest version of Image Resizer had stepped into Version 3 Preview 1, but don’t worry about the Preview 1 tag, it is fairly stable for normal usage (as claimed by the developer and tested by me.) .NET Framework 4 is required to run the new version though.

In this version, there are couple of new features implemented, and there are more promising features coming.

Resize image to new folder – This is a really interesting feature (the developer called it Black Magic). It will allows you to resize images into a newly created folder, which is particularly useful if the original images are meant to be kept. Create a new folder together with your bunch of images, select the images you want to resize, right-click-hold and drag-and-drop to the newly created folder, then select Resize pictures here. I really liked this feature a lot.

Progress bar – Compared to the older version, this one comes with a progress bar to show the resizing progress, which is really something good, since the older version tends to become unresponsive during the resizing process. No integration with the Windows 7 taskbar yet, but it’s a good start.

Metadata – The developer has rewritten the component for information preservation, therefore in this new version, all metadata from the original image will be kept. Good news for those who need every information from the original image.

Recycle replaced images – If you have selected the option Replace the originals before the resizing, all the replaced images will be transfer to Recycle Bin to avoid any complicated issue caused by the replacement. Just clean the Recycle Bin if the resized one is working well.

More features coming – Click on the Advance Settings, you can see the upcoming features, including JPEG quality level adjustment, user-defined default size, user-defined filename format, and selective metadata stripping. Good stuffs.

Performance

You might want to know how it performs in a bulk image resize. I did a simple test and the results will vary for everyone since it depends on the performance of your CPU, HDD etc., but I think it will be a good reference for those who wanted to know.

This test is performed on the PC equipped with AMD Athlon 7750 Dual-Core Processor (2.7GHz), 4GB DDR2 RAM, and SATA HDD 7200rpm. Image Resizer 3 Preview 1 and 130 images were resized to perform this simple test. After the test, I found that all 130 images are resized to 1024×768 in 1 minutes 45 seconds, which is pretty good in my opinion. Below is the comparison of the size before and after resizing:

Original: Average 2MB, 130 images, Total 293MB

Resized: Average 180KB, 130 images, Total 21.3MB

For quick sharing, the reduction of the total size from 293MB to 21.3MB is definitely much appreciated. All thanks to the Fant resampling algorithm, Image Resizer 3 is now able to produce small size, but higher quality output than the conventional JPEG compression algorithms.

If you prefer a official stable version of Image Resizer, you still can get the latest 2.1 stable, although I strongly recommended to get the version 3 since it is quite stable as well.

Download Image Resizer 3 Preview 1

Download Image Resizer 3 Preview 1

Download Image Resizer 3 Preview 3

(Download .NET Framework 4 – Needed for v.3)

About ghost301

Biomedical Engineer graduate in Malaysia, currently Software Application Engineer and UI/UX Designer in Materialise. Graphic Design/UI/UX/Tech/Formula 1/Gadget/Android/iOS Enthusiast. Windows Guides writer (www.mintywhite.com) and run Techie Talkz.

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Comments

3 thoughts on “Image Resizer – The Simplest Way to Resize Images”

  1. Uvais says:

    Nice tool Taylor Ling But i want to know is it any tool available which can wrote a common label like :my parties picture on my every pic

    1. Taylor Ling says:

      Hi Uvais,

      Do you mean prefix like 0001_My_Parties in every images you resize? I believe you can do it using some batch file renamer for now, but upcoming Image Resizer 3 should have this feature implemented. Keep your eyes on its development! :)

      1. Uvais says:

        Thanks for this superb tool but i want to ADD A NAME ON PICTURE :) See this image http://i52.tinypic.com/2zyldg5.jpg

Comments are closed.


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