If you’ve ever dabbled in blogging or digital content creation, you probably discovered fairly early on that such projects involve working a lot with images: resizing, converting, touching up, cropping, etc. Doing all of that manually can be a daunting task. In fact, in the web content creation world, working with images can take more time than producing quality written content.
Fortunately, working with images doesn’t have to be a chore – and the developers at VeprIT have a great solution that can save you a lot of time and headache!
Overview
VeprIT has created Resize Sense ($13.99, Mac App Store link) for just these sorts of tasks. Resize Sense a great batch image editing and converting tool that does the bulk of the work for you when dealing with repetitive image tasks, serving as an all-in-one solution for resizing and cropping images to exactly the right form and layout for your needs every single time.
Design
The impression I got when launching Resize Sense for the first time was that it has a very clean, streamlined design. All of the app’s functions take place in a single window, which contains all the tools you’ll need to import a set if photos, specify the position or angle you’d like those photos to have, selecting and adjusting your cropping ratio, and previewing the images to make sure the editing is done correctly.
The window is divided into three panes. First, you have a left pane, which functions as an image browser, displaying all of the images that you’re working on. It can display as many or as few images as you like – from one, to a hundred and one. Next, the top right pane is the space where the majority of the actual editing action happens, providing a real-time visual look at how each action affects your image. Finally, on the bottom right is the configuration pane, where you can select settings for resizing, straightening, or otherwise modifying the images in a set.
What’s beautiful about Rezize Sense is that the layout is so simple that anyone can use it, regardless of their computing experience. All of the tools and functions are right in front of you, and easy to identify and use. There is practically no room for confusion. From a design standpoint, I’ve rarely seen better – it even supports full-screen mode for those of you that prefer to work outside the scope of multiple windows.
Features
One of the real joys of Resize Sense is that it isn’t weighed down with a lot of advanced features to master. Instead, the app breaks things down into simple categories. You select either “single” or “presets” mode from the config pane depending on how you want to modify your image, and can choose what dimensions you’d like those images to fit.
In Single Mode, images can be cropped to fit a pre-determined height or width automatically, or altered freestyle, depending on how much individual control you want over the process. If you use a certain setup within Single Mode often, there’s even an option to save those settings as a preset, which you can view later in in Preset Mode. Built-in presets include common sizes, such as 3.5×5, 8×10, or adjustment by ratio, as well as square cropping, long or short edge cropping, straightening. and resizing to common paper stock sizes.
Fixed height and fixed width can be adjusted separately – or to make things even easier, you can also let the app itself manage the final orientation of your image based on your preferences, and the original image. In my experience, allowing Resize Sense to determine your images’ final orientation is a pretty safe move – out of 300 sample images I tested inside the app, I only got one result significantly different than I would have liked.
For images where important details could be lost by cropping, Resize Sense offers several ways to handle the change in aspect ration, deform, and even extend the canvas with borders in any color of your choosing – something I haven’t seen in any other batch image editing program I have used in the past. While editing your images, the toolbar provides quick access to all of your truly essential functions – copy and paste, selection, rotation, resetting a crop, and adding, removing, and saving images.
Ease of Use
The best feature of Resize Sense is just how incredibly easy it really is to use. It has virtually no learning curve. I could sit my mother in front of this app and have her up and running in no time. It really is that intuitive for everything from cropping, to resizing, and even even renaming images in a batch quickly, automatically, and without forcing your fingers to cramp!
Verdict[rating:4.5]
It is rare that I ever come across a piece of software that I find so immediately intuitive – and Resize Sense achieves that without sacrificing any features or functionality. I’ll be using this to resize my images for the forseeable future, and highly recommend it to anyone who frequently edits or adjusts large numbers of photos or images.
Resize Sense is available now for $13.99 from the Mac App Store (link), and a free trial can be downloaded from the developer’s website. For more information, or to purchase, visit VeprIT’s product page on the web.
Pros
- Clean, efficient design
- Affordable
- Extremely easy to use
- Supports most major image formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP)
- Can be customized to fit your needs
- Can save images image in several different sizes, under different filename patterns, and in various formats in a single batch operation
Cons
- I wish I would have found it sooner
