Media Resizer Pro

www.mediaresizer.com

_{Reviewed by} Maureen Shannon,NJPCUG

Recently we have been blessed with many products being offered to the membership at discounted prices as well as some for review. This handy little product is one you will love if you are working with digital images. This is a jewel in the crown of handy applications that delivers just what it promises!

For the past few months I have been helping a friend with a web site. This not only required designing and putting up the web site but working with very large batches of photos. My friend breeds Persian and Himalayan kittens and she takes photos of the kittens to put on the web site. When they are shooting the photos, they take many shots of each kitten and from there we decide which ones are the best for the web site. All of the photos need to be changed from the original files she brings me on CD’s. Everyone requires resizing. The original photos are huge and with my normal image editor I have the choice of resizing each photo one at a time or writing a script and doing a batch process. This is limited because it will not rename the images for me, only resize them. So a lot of extra work is needed to complete the process for every photo. Aside from this, many need color correcting, red eye removal, and watermarking. There’s a lot of work involved in processing these photos and then selecting which will be good enough to display on the web site. Many, many hours of work was involved in doing this. We constantly have to update the site with recent photos to show the kittens at their current stage of growth. Anything that makes this job easier is definitely something I want to have.

Along came Media Resizer Pro and immediately saved me vast amounts of time and work. I can’t begin to tell you how much I like this application. It’s wonderful! The photos are not all shot in landscape style either, some are portrait. I like to make the images a certain width and the height has to be adjusted accordingly. Usually this meant using an individual smart-sizing method on each photo…that is enter the width I want to use and then the editor sets the height automatically.  When I opened up Media Resizer Pro for the first time, I was astounded at all the things it would do in one process.

Firstly, it can be used to create thumbnail size images from photos or videos. If that were all it did, it would be a big help. It does much more though. You direct it to a folder where your images are and then you can tell it what size you want the images to be. You can also “smart crop” them to fit a certain height or width. Also on the opening interface screen you can rename the files, either their prefix for suffix, or both. You can also select the destination folder you want them sent to if it differs from the original. The preview window lets you see what you are doing. Clicking on the button with the directional arrows gives you a full sized preview of the photo. You also select the file format you want to use here too…..such as jpeg. It supports all major image formats. If that’s all you want to do than you just click the “Generate” and it’s done in no time!

Another button on the opening interface will take you to the styles section. Here you can alter the image corners and change the background color. The second tab on the page opens the Masks page and here you can add a fancy mask around the image.

It has a nice selection of masks that can be applied. In the example here, a tree shaped masked was selected and can be seen in the preview box. Optional settings allow you to rotate or flip the mask, change the background color (or edge color), and stretch or fit the mask to the thumbnail.

 This gives you another dimension of enhancement to the photo right at your fingertips.

And another button on the opening interface takes you to the watermark screen. You can add a watermark and/or a logo to the photo. You can add a text watermark that can include a copyright or registered symbol along with a date and text identity. The date can either be the current date or the date the image was created. And you have a number of position selections available for placement of the watermark. It also has a transparency setting and editable font choices.

The logo option lets you place the logo in a spot of your choosing and it too has an opacity setting. It also has a bump feature that will turn the logo a raised or embossed effect. As seen in the image to the left, I added a text logo, that is a mirrored image of my name, and I used the “bump” option to emboss the name.  The number of things you can do with this application is terrific. I am very impressed with it and have found it to be a great time saver for me.

Take into consideration how many digital images we all have, and most of us have CD’s that are full of shots we have taken, and then figure in the time it would take you just to resize and maybe put a dated watermark on each one. Then decide what it would be worth to you to have a product that would speed you through this task, you would probably agree that it was something you would definitely like to have in your image editing toolbox. Then too consider that it does a bunch of other things as well……I think you will realize very quickly how indispensable this application can be to those of us working with digital images. You don’t have to be working with large amounts of photos to find this worthwhile having either. If you a creating digital photo albums or scrapbooks, it can be a godsend for those projects.  It does a great job no matter how many photos you have but it’s fabulous for processing large batches of images. I’ve been working with this for several weeks now and I would definitely recommend trying it. One added note, I have found it to be very stable too.

MediaResizer Pro retails for $79. NJPCUG members will find a 30% discount offer on our web site.