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Batch resize JPEGs with a drag and drop using Picture Resizer

25 October 2011, Mike Williams

Resizing multiple images manually is a tedious business. You must open an image, choose the Resize option, configure it appropriately, save the image, close it, then start all over again.

And while there are plenty of batch image resizing tools around, they also require at least some significant configuration before you can get started.

Picture Resizer, though, takes a very different approach, which can at least let you carry out simple resizing operations without ever seeing a single dialog.

How? The secret is that the program embeds any options in its file name. By default, for instance, this is PhotoResize400.exe. If you download this image onto your desktop, then you can drag and drop selected images onto it, and these will be resized to be 400 pixels along their longest side, the other axis resized proportionally, and the finished results saved next to the originals (so Picture.jpg would be called Picture_400.jpg).

If you actually want to resize your images to have a maximum size of 320, then, all you have to do is rename the file to PhotoResize320.exe.

If you need to generate 640×480 pixel images, then you’d use a file name of PhotoResize640x480.exe.

Or, if you regularly use two or three sets of target dimensions, then you might keep several copies of the file to hand with different names (the executable is a tiny 305KB, and doesn’t require installation, so it’s not exactly going to consume much hard drive space).

Picture Resizer does actually support many more advanced resizing options. So a file name of PhotoResize_240.exe will resize the minimum size of an image to be 240 pixels, for instance; PhotoResizeP25.exe will resize an image by 25%; PhotoResizeG1024x768.exe uses content-aware resizing to change an image aspect ratio while minimising distortion, and that’s just the start (see the author’s page for more).

And this is clearly where the file name scheme begins to fall down a little; having a dialog to set up the appropriate options would be considerably easier.

If you only occasionally need to resize a small number of images, then, Picture Resizer probably isn’t for you. The hassle involved in setting it up each time will be more trouble than it’s worth.

If you regularly need to resize multiple images to the same target dimensions, though, it’s a different story. Configure a few copies of the Picture Resizer executable to handle your most common resize jobs, and that’s it, you’ll then be able to process tens, hundreds or thousands of images simply by dragging and dropping.

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