Image Resizer 3 Preview 3 Update 3 Released

That's right, I just a third minor update to Image Resizer 3 Preview 3. This one fixes a bug in the context menu handler that was causing problems with some other extensions. The update also includes some community translations to French and German.

Behind the scenes, this version also puts me in a good position to start tackling the remaining features that I have scheduled for version 3.

Image Resizer 3 Preview 3 Released

Just released another version of my Image Resizer. Here's a screenshot.

As you can see, there are a couple new features in the UI. You can select a resize mode of either Scale to or Stretch to (for those who don't care about maintaining the aspect ratio of their pictures). You can select a size unit of Pixels, Centimeters, Inches, or Percent. The new Ignore picture rotations setting at the bottom is handy for resizing a bunch of mixed-orientation pictures that you took with your camera. Before when you resized the portrait-oriented pictures would end up being smaller than the landscape-oriented ones. With the new option checked, both landscape and portrait pictures will end up being the same size.

There are also a few performance improvements and bug fixes in this release. For full details, be sure to check out the Image Resizer 3 Preview 3 release page.

Happy resizing!

Image Resizer 3 Preview 2

In case anyone missed it, I released a second preview of Image Resizer 3. I wanted to get the existing bits as stable as possible so I fixed a few bugs and created a setup bootstrapper so there is no longer separate 32-bit and 64-bit installers. The main feature I added was multi-threaded resizing so now all those powerful cores on you computer can be used for resizing.

I set this release as the default download since it is as stable as version 2 was with all of its features. I'm going to start taking slices from the version 3 backlog and hopefully get new drops out about every three months.

Enjoy!

Image Resizer 3 Preview 1

I just released the first preview of Image Resizer 3. For more details, see the link.

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)

Image Resizer 2.1.1 Released

I just wanted to give a quick update and let everyone know that Image Resizer 2.1.1 was released today.  Head on over to the downloads page to get it now.

I'm getting serious about version 3 of the utility, and I wanted to get a few of the community-contributed features out to the public before I started changing everything.  The features in this release include the following.

• Progress bar (by w3seek)
• German translation (by w3seek)
• French translation (by vince38)

The setup is still in English, but after installing, if you're using a French or German version of Windows, things should be in your native language.

Thanks for all your support!

Image Resizer 3.0 Update

A member of the CodePlex team at Microsoft recently contacted me.  He asked me if I would be interested in allowing CodePlex and PreEmptive Solutions to use my project as a showcase for an upcoming integration between their two companies.  I was flattered by this opportunity; however, I realized that in order to participate, I would have to rewrite a majority of my project into .NET.  Being the ambitious person I am (or perhaps just because I'm a Microsoft whore), I decided to go for it.

Originally, I had planned on working my way up to version 3.0 of Image Resizer. Version 2.2 was going to be a multi-lingual bug fix release, and version 2.3 would finally introduce some of my most requested new features.  But, in light of recent events, I am going to forgo these releases and dive strait into my 3.0 vision.

I've been racking my brain on how best to introduce the new features, and I think things are starting to come together nicely.  There will be two main applications: the Image Resizer, and it's Settings.  The Image Resizer is basically what the application is today with a major UI overhaul and some subtle new features.  It will be a multi-page dialog consisting of the following page, a progress page, and a results page.

Please note that this screenshot is not finalized.  There are a few more things I would like to add to it, and I'm sure it will go through a few more rounds of editing and polishing.  However, it gives you a good feel for the direction I am going.  I wanted to make the auto-width/height feature more discoverable so I made the width and height fields editable combo boxes instead of just text boxes.  Width and height prompts have been added for UI clarity, and the much requested units field is present.  As of right now, these are the only new features (well, one feature and a couple clarifications) I intend to add to this dialog; all other features will be added to the Settings dialog or through Windows Shell extensions.

The Settings dialog is where most of the new features will go.  I decided to put them here because many of them I expect will not be per-job settings, but rather one-time configurations.  These will be things like the output file name format, the list of default sizes (Small, Medium, Large, etc.), enabling/disabling the check for updates option, enabling/disabling the ignore image rotations option, and maybe even specifying the resize algorithm and image quality.  Accessing this dialog will done from the start menu and probably from somewhere in the above dialog (still working out the details).

All in all, I love the direction this software is going, and I can't wait to see the reception it gets from you users.  Be sure to comment or send me an email if you have something to say. Positive or negative, I always listen.

Image Resizer 3.0 Brainstorming

Today I did a little brainstorming about what I want version 3 of the Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows to be like. Probably the biggest thing I want to do is a complete overhaul of the user interface. This will probably include things like:

• More entry points
• Explorer toolbar resize option
• Drag-and-drop menu handler


• Better error reporting
• Branding

Just so you can get a feel of what I'm talking about, here is a little prototype I made today:

Another thing I want to do is rip out all the GDI+ code and replace it with the newer Windows Imaging Component (WIC) technology. WIC handles a lot more metadata, and it is extensible so my program could in theory support every image format known to man (assuming someone developes a WIC codec for it).

Last, but not least, I would like to address some of the feature requests that have been out there for a while. For example:

• Check for updates
• One installer for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
• Settings dialog


• Specify default sizes
• Specify resized file name format

Who knows, maybe I'll finally get some end-user documentation to put out there too. The future has much in store for this little utility!

Image Resizer 2.1

Version 2.1 of the Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows was actually released on Friday, December 11th, but I'm just now getting around to writing about it. (I've been sick for a few days.)

This was a particularly tricky release to plan.  The decisions of what to include in this release were governed by the following principles:

• Release as soon as possible
• Only include work items that affect a majority of the users
• Don't introduce any new UI elements
• Maintain compatibility with Microsoft-supported versions of Windows

The first of these (release as soon as possible) is pretty straightforward; I wanted to get new bits out and quick.  This manifested by cutting out time-consuming work items like Multi-Language Support.  I wasn't about to wait for the utility to be translated into 11+ different languages before releasing some of the more critical changes.

Only including work items that affected a majority of the users basically means that I want to tackle some of the most requested enhancements and most encountered problems.  The most requested features were Remember Resize Settings and Update/Modernize Default Sizes.  Of course, some users requested these in very strange ways such as doing away with the Basic view, or requesting that I add their specific size to the default list of sizes.

The Auto-Width/Height option wasn't really a request, but more of a compromise.  Many users requested that I change the resizing behavior to match that of Microsoft's version of the tool.  Personally, I believe that the way Microsoft did it is wrong: The UI read that the new image would fit a ____x____ screen, but in reality it would resize the new image to fill a screen of the specified dimensions.  I think that most users expect a resized image to fit within the dimensions they specify, so I refused to bring back the original's behavior.  After many heated discussions, I realized that it wasn't the old behavior that they wanted at all, but instead they just wanted to be able to resize an image to fill a specified width or height.  Essentially, the old tool would just take the biggest of the numbers you entered and use it (which makes me wonder why it forced you to enter two in the first place).  So I decided to give users the ability to just enter one of the width or height, and the other would be calculated accordingly.

The biggest thing, by far, that I wanted to fix with this release was in fact a user error.  I received a ton of feedback from users that my tool was a huge disappointment because it didn't work.  As I started looking into all these cases, I began to realize where my tool was breaking: it wasn't.  Users were ignorantly installing the 32-bit version of the utility on their 64-bit version of Windows.  This is a perfectly legitimate scenario, but the effect is that the Resize Pictures option will only appear in 32-bit programs.  They would browse to their pictures' folder in Windows Explorer (which would be a 64-bit program) and right-click, but the option to resize wouldn't be there.  They would then proceed to get angry and find a way to vent by leaving hate comments on blog posts or in my anonymous survey or by reviewing my software poorly because it doesn't work for them.  Naturally, this pissed me off so, due to these stupid users -- only those who got angry are stupid -- I decided to disallow 32-bit installs on a 64-bit operating system.

There were many other requests that I received; however, I also got a lot of feedback from users saying that, "It's perfect the way it is" and, "Avoid making it bloated," so I tried to keep the new features to a minimum for this release.

Anyway, back to my governing principles.  My reluctance to introduce any new UI elements was two-fold.  First, as I just mentioned, there were a lot of users that praised the simplicity of the tool and cautioned me against adding a bunch of bells and whistles.  The second reason that I was against it is because I have a lot of international users.  Seeing how the tool is currently only available in English, I'm sure that many people have learned to use it by memorization.  Introducing anything new or changed options would probably just confuse these users.

Finally, I wanted to make sure my tool ran on Microsoft-supported versions of Windows.  This of coursed meant including a fix for the Pre-XP Support issue.  This principle though actually ended up being more restrictive than I would have liked.  The tool is for a UI overhaul to bring it up to the Windows Vista/7 standard, but many of these things are not available in previous versions of Windows.  I would also like to change the resizing process to make use of Direct2D and the Windows Imaging Component, but again they're not backwards compatible.  This will probably continue to be a guiding principle for the next couple of releases, but after that I fully intend to break backwards compatibility in favor of new, innovative technologies.

All in all, I'm very proud of this release.  The code has become drastically cleaner as I have learned considerably more about C++, Win32, and ATL development.  The seemingly little new features pack quite a punch and make the tool a lot friendlier to use.  Go download it now, and tell all your friends.  Expect to see Multi-Language Support in the next release, and after that, prepare to have your minds blown...

Call for Feedback: New Advanced Options

I've recently created a work item on my Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows project titled New Advanced Options.

Basically, I am proposing the following changes:



I would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have on this. Please see the Work Item for more details.

Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows: The First Year

Last Saturday was the one year anniversary of my Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows project. I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the project's highlights of the past year.

A few years ago, my mother asked me if there was an easier way to resize photos. My dad had walked her through the steps of doing it one picture at a time through Photoshop, but that was such a tedious process. I, being the wonderful sun that I am, introduced her to Microsoft's Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP. A few years later however, she decided to get a new laptop with Windows Vista. She, like myself and so many others, was disappointed to find that the Powertoy would no longer work. Thus, I set off to change the world (or at least the world of image resizing).

The first step, as any great developer knows, was to see if it had already been done. There were a few other tools out there, but none of them really stood up to the original. I decided to develop it in C#/.NET (mostly I was just curious to see if it was even possible). I immediately hit a dead end. After a few weeks of searching however, I found an article that talked about Windows Shell Extension in C#. The article was bit dated, but using the MSDN articles I was able to get it working.
I decided to post the project on SourceForge.net because of the hard time I had finding examples of .NET Shell Extensions. Well, that and I knew that if I had any chance of it becoming popular, I would need a big name like SourceForge to help. I also knew that to succeed, people had to be able to find the thing. The name, I decided, needed to be as close to the original's as possible. So I took the original, "Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP," dropped the "XP" (as it no longer applied), and added the word "Clone" (to avoid getting sued by Microsoft). The final step of the release was getting it to show up on search engines. I posted a Digg article titled Image Resizer PowerToy for Windows Vista to hopefully spark some online gossip. Sure enough, the download counts started growing, and I slowly moved up the page on search results.
A couple months after the initial release, I got my first user-submitted issue. Earthclimate asked me to please maintain metadata. He discovered that, after resizing an image, all the metadata (e.g. date taken, tags, rating, camera type, f-stop, ISO settings, etc.) disappeared. I immediately fixed this and released the bits. Isn't open source wonderful?
The next major spike in downloads, I attribute to a blog post and YouTube upload about my project by PCWizKid. The month Windows Vista - Free Image Resizer was posted, I saw a 200% jump in downloads.
With more popularity comes more scrutiny. Rshelq submitted an issue regarding the application's poor image quality. Together, we optimized the resizing process to produce an image that was, according to rshelq, better than the software which I set out to clone. With the new changes came another 25% jump in downloads. The biggest jump in downloads, however, came in December. From November to December, there was a 100% jump (I know, 100 is smaller than 200 but these are increases in the number of downloads per month, not just increases in the number of downloads). Since December, the project has averaged about one download every six minutes!
One of the most frequent complaints I received was that my application didn't work on 64-bit editions of Windows. After seven months, I decided it was time to tackle the beast. After days and days of digging and hundreds of dollars later (What, I'm not going to blog that I pirated my copy of Windows Vista 64-bit), I decided that Windows Shell Extensions, written in .NET, don't work on 64-bit editions of Windows simply because: the coding gods forbid it. Yes, this is the most logical explanation I have. Despite everything being in place so that it should work, it just doesn't. So I did what I always do when I get stuck on a project: I started over from scratch. For the second version, I decided to listen when they said to never write Shell Extensions in .NET, and I did it the right way -- in good ol' C++. This was a fun experience; it had been nearly three years since I last touched C++, and I had to relearn pretty much everything about the language. I had also never done WIN32 or COM development (cryptic technologies that have been around for ages). However, using my amazing ability to learn new things (or maybe just my amazing ability to sift through pages and pages of dry technical documentation), I was able to get it working. There are still a few things left to do before I consider version 2.0 done (like proper error handling, and scrapping the dependency on MFC which adds nearly 12 MB to the download), but the Beta seems to be flourishing well with over 16,000 downloads (2,500 of which are for the 64-bit edition).
So, in celebration of a great first year, I want to thank everyone who has helped contribute to the success of this little project. So far, the project has been downloaded over 50,000 times! If you're interested in contributing, you can do so by spreading the word (like all those awesome bloggers out there who make my project look sexy), submitting a feature request or bug report, or simply by downloading and using it. The project, which was migrated to CodePlex due to the degrading quality of SourceForge's services, can be found at PhotoToysClone.CodePlex.com. Enjoy, and happy resizing!

Image Resizer 2.0 Beta

It's finally here -- the moment you've all been waiting for. Last night, I released version 2.0 beta of my Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows. The most notable new feature is 64-bit support.
This project was a lot of fun because it was my first production-quality C++ application. The code could still use a lot of optimization and error handling, but I'm happy with my work.
I have tested this version on Windows XP, Windows Vista x64, and yes, even Windows 7 x64. Support for pre-XP versions will be coming in the 2.0 final version, but if you actually need it for versions of Windows that old, I suggest upgrading!
The new version can be downloaded from here.

Image Resizer Powertoy Clone 2.0 in the Works

Over this past week, I have been working hard to get my Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for Windows working on Vista x64. I have tried every tweak I could think of to get the current version working, but to no avail.

I believe that the problem is due to the fact that the project is written in C#/.NET. When a .NET Assembly is registered as a COM object, it uses mscoree.dll as the in-process server to handle communication between COM clients and the .NET Assembly. I suspect that this file is a 32-bit DLL and, thus, cannot be loaded into the 64-bit explorer.exe. (EDIT: That statement was not true.) ...or at least that's my theory.

I have taken this opportunity to dust off my C++/WIN32 skills. I am rewriting the entire application in C++ (the way it should have been done in the first place). In a few weeks, I expect to have a working 64-bit version of the shell extension. I am also going to further investigate problems people have had with it not working in versions of Windows prior to XP (I know what the problem is, but I never could get it resolved).

Along with these new upgrades, I am playing with the idea of moving the project to CodePlex. It's kind of ironic that I would let Microsoft host a project I stole from them, but SourceForge is a nightmare to deal with these days.

Image Resizer PowerToy Clone for Windows 1.1

I just released another version of my Image Resizer PowerToy Clone for Windows. Thanks to a feature request by rshelq, the quality of images has been drastically improved. Would you believe it, that little tool is up to 10,209 total downloads. It's popularity just keeps growing; it has averaged 90 downloads per day in the past three months. It'll be exciting to see where it goes from here.

Rshelq also stated that the quality is, "now better than the software which you set out to clone!"

Image Resizer PowerToy for Windows Vista

Remember that wonderful Image Resizer PowerToy Microsoft released for Windows XP? I have recreated it and now it will also work on Windows Visa! This is an incredibly useful tool that allows you to mass-resize images just by right-clicking on them. Click here to download Image Resizer PowerToy for Windows Vista. Enjoy!

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