October 24, 2010

Image Resizer 3 CTP

Lately, I've been working on version 3 of my Image Resizer.  I think I'm finally narrowing in on the interface design (your feedback is welcomed).  The text may change a bit for the final release, and I might add a footer to the dialog, but I'm pretty happy with the way it's looking.

The Advanced settings link will pop up another dialog box that will let you set things like the following.
  • JPEG Quality Level
  • Custom default sizes (edit or replace the Small, Medium, Large, etc. options)
  • Resized image filename
  • Disable copying of metadata
  • Disable check for updates
  • Disable usage reporting
After clicking Resize, it will go to a progress page while your pictures are resized.  I intend to make the resize process multi-threaded so if you have more than one CPU, you should notice some good speed improvements for those large resize jobs.

When the resize is completed, a summary page will be displayed letting you know of any errors or warnings that occurred during the resize.

I am about a week or two away form releasing a preview of the new version.  That preview will include all the functionality of the current version, plus a handful of the more basic features:
  • Resize units (Pixels, Percent, Inches, and Centimeters)
  • Resize to a specific folder
  • Put replaced images in the Recycle Bin
And of course, the things that caused me to rewrite a version 3 in the first place:
  • Sexy new UI
    • Progress bar
  • Resize using WIC (instead of GDI+)
    • More metadata is copied
    • Any WIC driver/codec is supported
    • Animated GIFs can be resized
    • Multi-page TIFFs too
  • Multi-threaded resizing
After the first CTP release, I'll continue to whittle away at the features, and I'll keep the CTPs coming until I finally reach feature complete for version 3.  Wow, I have a lot of work to do!

Oh, a few more goals that I have for version 3 that didn't get mentioned:
  • Documentation
    • Screencasts
  • Re-branding
  • Evangalizm
    • Youtube screencasts
    • Facebook page
    • Twitter hashtag
  • Translations to other languages
  • A single setup (for all of 32 and 64 bit, English and non-English versions alike)

10 comments :

Unknown said...

Looking forward to a beta version. I have raw NEF files that I would love to be able to quickly resize to jpg for emails and blog posts.
Thanks for the update.

Brice Lambson said...

Hi Brad, thanks for your support!

I'm not entierly sure how NEF files will work with Image Resizer 3. If you have a NEF codec installed that also supports encoding, it will simply resize them to a new NEF file. Otherwise, it will certainly resize them to JPEGs.

I do have a seperate utility on my radar for transcoding images, but there's no saying when I'll acutally get around to working on it. :)

If you're a hacker though, you could easly change one line of code to make it always output JPEGs.

If you're not a hacker and you can't get things working as you'd like on version 3, shoot me an email and I'd be glad to do the hack for you.

I'm hoping to get the preview out by November 8th.

Unknown said...

congratulations for this great tool. Keep going. I've been using for a few days. I'll post any suggestions in cas I have one

Andres Enrique said...

Hi Brice,

Is there a way to resize the images but keep all the photo information?

for example
Date:
Full Image:
Displayed Image:
Scaled to:
File size:
EXIF Date:
Camera:
ISO:
Shutter Speed:
Aperture:
Focal Length:
Flash fired:
Image number:

Brice Lambson said...

Hi Andres,

I replied via your discussion thread.

Unknown said...

Brice,
Did you ever release a beta of version 3? I've been anxious to test the possibility to go from NEF to jpeg.

Brice Lambson said...

Hi Brad,

Sorry I've been slacking a bit. :) I should have a preview out sometime this month.

Brice Lambson said...

FYI, I released a preview of version 3 last night: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1

G said...

Brice - first off, GREAT work on this tool. its very useful. Couple of questions though please. I'm running the beta on Win7 64bit and I dont see the pixel option for width like you've shown in the screen cap you provided. Is that feature still pending? Also, is there a way a use the tool via command line in Powershell? We're looking at taking ID badge photos and batching them down to be used as pictures in AD on user objects.

Thanks!

Brice Lambson said...

@G: I'm still working on version 3, the units should make it into the next preview release. Right now, there's no easy PowerShell integration, but the code is open source so writing your own Cmdlet shouldn't be too difficult. Most of the resizing code is in the ResizingService class.