Wednesday, January 13, 2010
As a long-time web developer, I couldn't imagine not having an array of image editing tools at my finger tips. But, in working with EditMe customers, I'm constantly reminded that computers (Windows and MacOS) don't come with even halfway decent image editing tools. Given the infrequency with which the typical computer user needs to edit images, I guess it's not entirely surprising.
Today's digital cameras take gargantuan high resolution images, often 2-5 MB in size! It's not infrequent that I see EditMe customers uploading these HUGE images to their sites, dropping them into a page and then scaling them down to size in the editor.
The problem with this is that the image isn't really being resized - it's just being shown smaller. Visitors to your site still have to wait to download your massive image, even if it's being shown at 2 inches square.
(Note: If you're using EditMe's recently released Photo Gallery module, those thumbnails are actually resized.)
Luckily, the magic of little single-purpose web applications means there are lots of free options on the web for resizing and cropping that image down to size before uploading it to your EditMe site. Here are a few worth looking at.
This is nice and simple. Upload your photo, resize (by percentage or by specifying a pixel size), and optionally crop with a point and click. This tool also offers a number of image filters you can run (with instant previews) to add effects to your image. Only drawback here is a somewhat tricky cropping tool. http://picresize.com
If you don't need the fancy filters and effects picresize offers, Web Resizer gives you a better cropping tool. You can drag the crop area around and resize using any of 6 draggable handles. You can also fine tune the exposure, which is very handy for photographs. http://www.webresizer.com
Resize.it has much less of a polished interface than the previous two, but does allow you to work with your photo at its actual size. This can be a little daunting given just how big high resolution photos can be, but it does provide extremely precise cropping for that reason. For resizing, it's extremely quick - just upload, select a standard size and you get your resized image in the browser. It's biggest drawback is that you can't both crop and resize an image in one action. http://www.resize.it
