Dropresize creates a special folder on your machine such that any images placed in this folder are automatically resized as per a predefined height or width and quality setting. This free program is designed for quickly resizing images for the purposes of posting on the internet.
If you post images on the internet you know that in most cases images need to be resized for optimal viewing in a browser and the compression quality adjusted to make the file sizes smaller and faster to download (my preferred settings, for example, are a width of 800 pixels and 80% quality setting). Dropresize is a program that provides a simple way to perform these adjustments on images simply by moving them to a designated folder. Here are more notes on this program.
- How it works: Dropresize is a background app that lives in the system tray and monitors a designated folder on your hard drive. Once it detects images moved into that folder it automatically resizes them based on your size and quality settings. (Note: max resize is 1600 pixels, and images smaller than your defined resolution settings will not be enlarged).
- Settings: users can specify desired height OR desired width in pixels, as well as the compression quality settings.
- Supported filetypes: at the moment of this writing only Jpegs are supported, but it seems there are plans to support other image types.
- Portable: unzip and run. No install needed. If you want this app to be launched when you boot into Windows you need to manually add it to the startup folder (found in the Windows’ start menu).
- Memory consumption: this is a MS .NET app and therefore memory consumption can be somewhat unclear. I believe its takes about 15 megs in memory, which is not that much but not quite lightweight.
Wish list: I could go on and on with ideas to make this better, but will make it brief
- Auto rename: automatically adding a prefix or suffix to the file names; such as appending an “_s” to the filename fo example to indicate that it is a resized version.
- Multiple profiles: for example having one folder resize to width=800 and another to width=200 (for thumbnails), etc.
The verdict: while there are many ways to resize images in batch, the “designated folder” concept employed by Dropresize is both innovative and appealing. The program is still in beta and my guess is that it will be improved greatly, but at what it does Dropresize works really well. If you frequently have to resize images for the internet then check this one out for sure.
Version Tested: 0.1.3b
Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Requires Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or newer. (This is already pre-installed in Vista).
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 22.99K).
Indeed interesting approach with folder. I use IrfanView for bulk operations and it takes plenty of clicks to setup operation.
My personal choice for posting screenshots is cropping rather than resizing, keeping pixel ratio makes more natural illustration.
A possible good alternative to what I do now…a script in XnView
Im using Xnview also (unless im working in PS in the first place).
This looks like it could be good for those in a hurry posts.
Thanx again for this great blog.
off topic – is it only me that boffs up these captcha codes …..im starting to feel senile.
This is definitely a good application. I run into this problem everyday to reduce size of images for posting on my website. This would be a pretty neat trick to resize them.
Photo Resizer seems to be easiest way to resize photos. I’ve added “Resize to 400″, “Resize to 640″ options to my context menu. Right-click an image, click the appropriate resizing option, and it makes a new file with the desired size, and appends “400″ or “640″ to the file name.