While image editing apps are in abundance, the one that is perfect for your everyday uses are hard to find. Using Photoshop just to resize images would be an overkill. If you are a Mac user, you could try ResizeMe – an image processing application that can manipulate images in several ways, and in bulk.
The Features
When you first open ResizeMe, the first thing that you will immediately see is the file list pane on the left and the image preview pane on its right. If you select one image from the list, ResizeMe will display preview of what the processed image will look.
Adding images to be processed is easy. You can drag and drop them in the list pane, or you can add them using the “+ (plus)” button below. Deleting one from the list is also as simple as clicking the “– (minus)” button.
ResizeMe offers many quick image manipulating features that can be very useful for everyday users. The first one on the list is “Scale & Resize“. As the name suggests, this feature will help you resize the image to the pixels that you need. To avoid distortion, check “Keep Aspect Ratio” box. While “Only scale down” option will reduce the size of any image larger than the set limit but will not mess with the smaller ones. These options are very useful to keep your images within your blog layout size.
Once in a while, you will encounter un-straight photos. The second feature – “Rotate or Flip” – is your answer. You can choose free rotate or directly set the image to Landscape/Portrait. The feature also allows you to flip the image horizontally or vertically. To get maximum result, this feature is best combined with the crop feature.
The “Crop” feature itself is pretty straightforward. You set the result size that you want, and you set the area where the cropping should start. Unfortunately we couldn’t drag and move the cropping area in the preview.
“Reflection” is a neat trick that you could apply to your image. Set the “Opacity” and “Amount” of reflection to get the effect that you desire.
It’s nice to see reflections of boxes of images. But I personally think that you would get the best result from this feature if you apply the effect to images with transparent background like this one.
Another nice effect that you can apply to your images is “Drop Shadow“. You can customize the color, angle, offset, blur and opacity of the shadow.
Similar to “Reflection“, “Drop Shadow” will also give you different result if applied to boxes and partially transparent images.
Want to protect your images from image thieves? You can put your watermark there. You can, for example, put your website address on the image. So, even though people can still steal your images, they will also promote your site for free.
Aside from customizing the text, you can also set the angle, color, and opacity of the watermark.
If you need your images to be in other formats, ResizeMe also provide the easy way to do that. Just go to “Output Format” feature.
Renaming images in a bulk will not be a mundane task anymore as you can do it easily with the help of “Rename” feature in ResizeMe.
Process, Preset, Go!
After you satisfied with all the changes that you’ve made, click the “Go” button at the lower right of the window to apply them to your images. The one thing that you should pay attention to is that ResizeMe process all the files in the list at once according to the settings. If you want to apply different settings to different pictures, you should do it in different sessions.
The good news is that you can save the settings as presets. So, repeating the same process to different images in the future would be as easy as choosing a preset and pressing “Go“. I personally found ResizeMe to be very useful for my light image manipulation needs, especially when I have to apply similar changes to groups of images. What about you? Have you tried ResizeMe? Do you know any alternatives? Please share your findings in the comment below.
