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XnView – A Free Image Viewer and Image Converter You Should Really Consider

Saikat Basu — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:30:31 +0000

We have looked at quite a few image viewers in the past. A place at the head of the table has been reserved for IrfanView, a really good and compact image viewer. It has come in for special praise. Then there have been some others image tools too which have earned a good word.

But admittedly, we have been neglecting a great image software called XnView. We know a good thing when some of our knowledgeable readers start giving it a few raves. Some comments have even mentioned that it can easily give IrfanView a run for its money.

So to start off, XnView is a cross-platform image viewer/browser, image organizer, and an image converter with a host of utilitarian tools for image work. Just what are these helpful tools that make XnView a thoroughbred in the rich stable of image and graphic tools? Let’s find out.

Choices from the Start

XnView gives you quite a few options when it comes to the download. XnView (ver.1.97.8) is a 15 MB free download. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux x86, FreeBSD x86, OpenBSD x86, NetBSD x86, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, and AIX. Whew!

It is available in 44 languages (Windows only). More importantly, it is available for a free download in multiple variants ““ Standard, Minimal, U3 USB, for Pocket PCs and Smartphones (Windows Mobile), and as an extension for windows explorer. The XnView v1.97.8 Complete Version can be downloaded as an EXE setup file or as a ZIP file which also makes it portable. The complete version has the full complement of files to work with images.

The Windows Explorer like Look

The Explorer-like interface may make it seem a bit boring, but it does give fast access to your image folders that may be scattered around. You can easily customize the layout to your comfort with the layout options given in the menu.

XnView is also skinnable. The panes can also be dragged and resized. Enhance the thumbnail visibility by turning off the image labels and increasing the size of the thumbnails.

Select an image and open it in a new tab with a click or open it in a separate tab next to the main browser tab. Isolating an image in a separate tab gives you a full toolbar of tools to work with on the image.

You can crop an image, transform an image, adjust colors, remove red eye, start a quick slideshow with all the images in the folder, organize the image in the right folder, and convert the image to another format.

Import 400 & Export 50 Graphic File Formats

If you are searching for something which can let you view a MonkeyCard file, or something that’s even rarer, XnView just might have it in the 400 odd formats it supports. IrfanView supports about 70 image formats. It can write to 50 file formats too when it does the conversions. Most of the digital camera formats are supported. XnView can also display video formats. Just like IrfanView, some formats require plugins.

The Image Processing Powerhouse

XnView has quite a lineup of effects and filters. Effects can be moderated with the help of the “˜Before’ and “˜After’ screens. You can also use Adobe Photoshop plugins with XnView.

With XnView it’s easy to rotate and flip images without any loss in quality as it supports JPEG Lossless transformations.

XnView includes a host of batch processing choices from image renaming to resizing. You can apply a whole lineup of transformations in sequence to a batch of images. Often, batch processing is what you need to rename a bunch of files downloaded from a digital camera. You can set it to run and remove red eye effects, add watermarks, clean metadata, etc.

XnView comes with a nifty quick image capture tool that can snap your active desktop, any window, the active window or a defined rectangular area.

With XnView, you can quickly create and edit multi-page files in the TIFF format. You can also make strips of images in horizontal or vertical alignments. This way, you can store a sequence of images (like a lot of scanned images) with all data intact in a single TIFF multipage file.

The Image Organizer

With the help of XnView, you can sort images around a lot of parameters. Metadata support is of course, one (EXIF, IPTC, XMP). You can define categories and finetune them with tags. Further image organization options include color labeling and ratings. Organizing images helps in the long run because you can use filters to sort through your image archives quickly.

XnView – The Final Effect

With its range of options, XnView goes beyond the definition of a basic image software. There are a host of features I haven’t been able to cover. Here’s a summary of features. XnView is worth a download just for the sheer number of file formats it supports. If I have a peeve, it’s with the absence of an updated and linked help file.

Download XnView and potter around it. Let us know if you are a convert or you would still stick to the image software you already have.

FastStone Image Viewer – Undoubtedly The Best Image Viewer, Converter & Editor Bundle

Saikat Basu — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:30:18 +0000

Image editors are a large breed. I have been a diehard IrfanView user ever since it came out. It very rightly blows Windows Viewer out of the water. But are there any similar image editors of its ilk; a fast, tiny image editor that can hold up its own with the best of the class?

There were some positive user recommendations in the comments section. A couple of them pointed to FastStone Image Viewer. FastStone Image Viewer is one of the best image viewers – it’s a viewer, converter, and editor that offers something for everyone. It is totally free for personal use.

Firstly, FastStone Image Viewer (ver.4.2) at a download size of 4.5MB is more compact than IrfanView. It is supported on Windows 98SE, ME, XP (32-bit and 64-bit), Vista (32-bit and 64-bit), and Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit).

It comes in three download options (exe, zip, or portable). FastStone Image Viewer opens at a pace that’s a shade slower than IrfanView because it opens up on a startup folder.

But once it opens up, it presents its array of image features in a familiar Windows Explorer like interface.

Most features are intuitive, but FastStone Image Viewer also has a downloadable tutorial file that’s a great help to have around. Taking them all up would be too much of a read, so let’s look at 10 really cool ones.

Support for Lots of Image Formats

Supports many digital image formats as illustrated in the screenshot above.

Choice of Skins and Languages

You can select from 10 skins and 19 languages. The interface gives you three ways to navigate through your images ““ a folder tree window, a thumbnail window, and a preview window.

Download Photos from Card Reader or Camera

FastStone has an easy to use automatic Download Photos feature that lets you read the photos directly from the attached device, save it to a folder, and rename it on the fly. You can also create folders for the images as you go.

The Full Screen View

Unlike lots of image viewers, the full screen view also throws up lots of features for viewing and manipulating images. You can move between the images in full screen view. Moving the mouse to four corners of the screen brings up different control panels.

Move the mouse to the right corner to bring up the File and Attributes window. At a glance you can check image data like EXIF, Histograms, and you can even add your comments here or see the added ones.

Moving the mouse to the top corner pops up the Thumbnail Browser Window like a photo strip. You can use this to jump to different images.

A mouseover on the left side of the screen brings up the File Management Window. You will find here many of the file and image editing functions.

The bottom corner is for the Control Bar and the Navigator Window for other program functions.

Comparing Images in the Comparator View

A very useful tool for photographers is the Compare Selected Images feature which lets you view a maximum of four images side-by-side. You can view them with different magnification settings, move them around the window, and also compare histogram and EXIF data.

Image Management with Sort and Tag

Sorting rearranges how the thumbnails are viewed in FastStone. You can arrange them in many ways from the Sort Box in the toolbar. You can also drag “˜n drop images to custom sort them as you wish. FastStone remembers the order when you come back to the folder.

For more image control, you can tag (and untag) images via FastStone. By default it is off. Tagging is a way to select different files and perform operations on them without touching any of the others.

Use the Draw Board

The Draw Board is for adding text, graphics and watermarks to images. It is like a small editor for adding text, lines, callouts, ellipses etc to a selected image.

Creating and Saving Slideshows

Many image editors will play a slideshow with a single click. FastStone does one better by letting you create and package one using the Slideshow Builder. You can select images, add text, music, and choice of 156 transitions to make one in a jiffy. You can stylize the slideshow with an opening cover image, set a quality setting, and save it as an EXE bundle.

Emailing Images Across

With FastStone it’s not only about sending images as attachments via your email client. In fact, you can resize, rename, modify image quality, add border effects, and compress them into a zip file.

As a Screen Capture Tool

This is what we web workers always need. You might too. Check out the screenshot above which shows you the screen capture prowess of FastStone.

Some features that have gone unmentioned

I have covered some of the bells and whistles which I really liked. In the interests of space, I have left out a few more advanced features and the more obvious ones. Worthy of mention are

- Batch processing tools which can resize, resample, convert, add a watermark etc to a bunch of images.

- Image manipulation features like redeye removal, changing color tones, special effects like drop shadow, framing, bump map, lens, morph, waves etc.

- Image EXIF metadata support and comment editing for JPEGs.

- Image collection tools like Contact Sheet Builder, Multi-page File Builder, and Image Strip Builder. Also included is a Multi-page File Splitter which can extract images from a multi-page file.

- And try out the Set Wallpaper Anywhere on Desktop feature which creates stylish montages from a bunch of photos and sets it up as wallpapers. Just the thing for those family photos.

The long list of features that FastStone Image Viewer offers can seem overwhelming at first. But try them out with a bunch of photos and you will get the hang of it in no time. I did, and now the image tool is an indispensable part of my PC.

Will this great freeware prove to be the same for you?

Convert Images To Text Online With Free OCR

Karl L. Gechlik — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:31:53 +0000

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me why they could not edit a block of text in Microsoft Word I would be rich. A lot of times people will include images of text within their document. Maybe they took a screenshot of a block of text or they inserted an image that was provided to them.

How about free OCR software that will undo the chaos and give you the text from the image so you can copy, paste or edit at will?

Now this is only one use for Free OCR. We can also use Free OCR to take a picture of a block of text and convert it into editable text. We can also take pictures of signs or other documents to be able to edit its text.

Let’s take a look at Free OCR and how it works.

It is free web based OCR software.
It can convert any image under 2MB into text.
You can only upload 10 images per hour.
You can have text in multiple columns and it will still work.
It can handle multiple languages including Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Ukrainian and finally Vietnamese.

When we first arrive at their website we will see this:

The website is very straight forward. Just click on the browse button to point Free OCR to your image like so:

You can convert a JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP or the first page of a PDF. I grabbed a picture of their homepage and wanted to see what it would do. Here is the image I used:

I saved it as a JPG with the highest resolution I could. After you submit your job you will see a progress bar.

When it is complete you will see a screen with your transcribed characters. On my first document it worked pretty swiftly and these were my results:

It was perfect! And the best part was I can now copy and paste the text by simply highlighting it and using control + c and control + v!

Check it out:

Now let’s see how it handles a read deal picture using my 5 mega pixel camera on my phone. Here is an image of a document. I pointed my camera at the monitor and snapped away.

The data contained in it was from Wikipedia. It was an entry on the Nintendo Wii. The above image has been scaled down and was originally a full 5 mega pixels. This is what the web application spit back at us:

It was a perfect paragraph. The hyperlinks obviously were not duplicated but I did not expect it to. But it did grab all the text. I tried it multiple times and realized that by dipping below 5 mega pixels the document was not properly transcribed. If I just grabbed a document off the web in a normal JPG format it mutilated it. So if you are getting unexpected results grab a higher resolution image!

What do you use for OCR? We would love to hear about your favorite application in the comments! You can see some of our favorite OCR applications here.

Perform A Variety Of Batch-Processing Commands On Your Photos With Phatch

Varun Kashyap — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:30:26 +0000

Batch processing photos is a very common need if you have digital camera or a mobile phone with a decent camera. I recently realized how cumbersome it can get when you have to make the same edits to hundreds of photos, just because the camera settings were not right to suit the conditions.

There are, of course, other uses for batch processing photos limited only by the type of application you are using. We have shown you some batch processors before. However, those were focused on fairly trivial tasks that you could automate.

If you want to achieve something more challenging you would have to resort to Photoshop Actions or GIMP scripts. Or, as we shall do now, you can look into the cross platform application – Phatch. Phatch is an awesome tool that lets you do a number of operations to a batch of your photos in a snap. As the Phatch website details, Phatch is actually “photo + batch”!

DEB packages and a PPA are available for Ubuntu users, installation on Windows and Mac is bit more involved and requires you to download and install Python and wxPython separately before you can use Phatch. Nevertheless, follow the instructions on the Phatch download page and installation is fairly trivial.

Once you have Phatch on your computer, fire it up and let’s see what this baby can do. You will be greeted by a Phatch window prompting you to add actions. Click the ‘+’ sign and it opens up a window wherein you can choose various actions that Phatch photo batch processor can perform on your photos.

There are a number of actions you can choose from. The actions are categorized according to the function they perform. For example, you can find actions to downsize or crop an image under “Size” and actions to remove or manipulate exif data under the “Metadata” category. Click on the action you want to perform and hit Add. You can now specify various parameters as required by the actions. You can enable/disable added actions, remove actions from your list or change the order of the actions to achieve what you want. You would need to add a “Save action” at the end of the list. If you don’t, Phatch will prompt and add one for you.

Let’s now put Phatch to test and try to accomplish something fairly challenging. Let’s say you have got a batch of images out of your camera and they seem too flat. You would like to adjust contrast, add a border, crop them to a specific size, remove metadata and add watermark so that they all look the consistent when you upload them to say – your Facebook album. Here is one possible way Phatch can accomplish this:

Add the Crop action, specify the parameters according to your requirements
Add the Auto Contrast action
Add the Border action and specify the border size and color
Add the Delete Tags action and choose all
Add the Watermark action, choose the watermark image and specify other details
Add the Save action, choose the filename and location and you are all set to roll

Now go to the Tools menu and choose Execute. You can choose the files/folders containing the images you would like to apply the action list to. Choose the filetypes you want to process and uncheck the ones you want to ignore. Customize a bunch of other settings according to your needs and hit Batch. Phatch will faithfully do whatever you taught it above and you can then view the results in Save action’s configured folder.

Phatch is really an extraordinary tool if you need a tool for batch processing photos. It offers a lot of functionality and actions that can utilize in your batch processing. Do you know of any similar application? Let us know in comments!

The Top 3 Apps to Batch Rename, Convert & Resize Photos (Windows only)

Simon Slangen — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:00:16 +0000

When working with a lot of files, it can be useful to append some sort of pattern in naming, size, or otherwise. However, you’ll often get a lot of these mixed up. Even more so when working with huge batches of pictures.

If you want to attain some order, editing those pictures is necessary. If you’ve got a somewhat decent collection, this can be a long and tedious task – unless you use a batch processing application.

These ‘batch applications’ can process your pictures automatically, editing an incredibly big batch of files with the click of a mouse. These kind of editing macros can save you a lot of effort, and makes the (practically) impossible possible.

Batch Renaming – Rename Master

A batch renaming application will append the same naming structure on all of your files. This is one of the most prominent reasons for batch processing; to change those damn ugly and incompatible filenames into something useful.

Rename Master is the king of the (freeware) rename applications. Not only can it create new nametags for whole folders at once, more flexible naming schemes can be composed to reuse previous parts of the filenames, or even use metadata like the dates those pictures were taken. Too fancy? Just jot down a fancy name with a numbering prefix or suffix.

As a surplus, Rename Master can also be used to rename other types of files.

You might also want to check out Saikat’s post on Renaming Pictures with the Date They Were Shot.

Batch Resizing – Photosizer

Fotosizer will – as the name implies – resize all of your pictures. You can do this by defining a percentage, or by supplying maximum width and height dimensions. Alternatively, you can also use a preset size, to prep your images for custom displays, like a PSP or iPod. A tool like this is especially handy if you’re working with extremely high resolution photography, and want to create some lighter, screen-friendly duplicates.

Fotosizer is nice on the eye, and has an easy to use interface. If you want, you can also use Fotosizer to rename your pictures, although I find it less advanced and more complicated to use than Rename Master.

You can also take a look at Jimmy’s post on Batch Editing Your Images with GIMP.

Mac fanatics might want to check out Jackson’s post on Pixer.

Batch Convert (+ Resize) – PicSizer

PicSizer is actually a resizing application (who would guess?). Nevertheless, It doesn’t offer any advantages over Fotosize – except conversion functionality. In this article, I will regard solely PicSizer as such – a tool to lift images from one filetype to another, because to be honest, it does this better than most other freeware batch conversion applications.

PicSizer supports a few file formats, including about all the popular ones; JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, TGA and PNG. The application can also convert images between these formats. If you choose JPG or PNG – which I advise – you can even choose your compression ratio.

With these three tools, you should have pretty much all of the batch image manipulations covered. Note that not all of these applications are excessively present in the freeware world, and we had to look at a resizing app to get decent conversion functionality. If you know of any other – perhaps better? – batch processing tools, you can tell us in the comments section below.

Increase Image Resolution: Convert Raster Images to Vector

Jorge Sierra — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:01:26 +0000

Most of the digital images and pictures you see on the web are raster graphics images or bitmaps (.bmp). A raster graphics image is simply defined with a grid of pixels that are set to certain colors. Raster graphics images are resolution dependent and cannot be made larger without loss of apparent quality. Therefore, for images that need to be scaled to higher resolution often it is better to use vector graphics.

Images that are rendered using vector graphics will scale to any size and still maintain smooth edges. This is ideal for dealing with things such as fonts and logos. Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor that you can use to convert raster images to vector graphic images.

I will demonstrate how to use Inkscape to convert the Inkscape logo above into an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) image. SVG is a vector graphics file format.

First of all you will need to download Inkscape and install it. It’s available for Mac OS X and Windows, and of course with the source you can compile it on Linux and other platforms as well.

Once you’ve installed Inkscape, launch it and open the raster image you want to convert. In this example, I’ve opened the inkscape-logo.png file. You can see from the screenshot that the edges are not smooth. Converting it to an SVG file will allow us to scale it to any size, and maintain the smooth edges.

Select the entire image by navigating to Edit > Select All in the Inkscape menu or by pressing Ctrl-A on your keyboard. Then go to Path > Trace Bitmap – or press Shift-Alt-B on your keyboard. In the trace bitmap dialog, select Colors as the mode and be sure that Smooth is unchecked.

Click the OK button and the conversion will take place but the dialog box will be on the screen. Close the dialog box by clicking the X in the upper right corner. Next you have to get rid of the original image, which is lying beneath the trace you just performed. To view the original, go to Object > Lower to Bottom or press the End key on your keyboard.

Now the original jagged looking image should be on top. Click on it to select it and then press the Delete key on your keyboard. Now you should see the nice and pretty vector image with smooth edges. Next, save the file by navigating to File > Save As”¦ Give the file a new name, and be sure that the file type in the bottom right is Inkscape SVG. The image below was created from the SVG file I made.

When you do use your SVG images in web pages, you’ll want to convert them from SVG back to a raster image, just as I did in the image above. To do this, just go to File > Export Bitmap”¦ Not all browsers support SVG images, so you’re better off exporting SVGs to bitmaps. This way you will have your nice image and also be able to use it online.

Using SVGs makes a big difference when you scale the images to be much larger than the originals. Wikimedia Commons actually has a better SVG image for the Inkscape logo than I made. The Wikimedia Foundation has made an effort to make most diagrams and logos available as SVG files, to allow them to be used at higher resolutions without degrading the original content.

Are you aware of any other free tools that can convert raster images to vector graphics?

Iconvert Converts Windows Icons to Mac and Vice Versa Online

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:01:00 +0000

Using a free tool called iconvert you can now easily convert Windows icons to Mac OS X icon files, convert Mac OS X icons to Windows and also create new icons from standard JPG’s and eight other formats. Iconvert also outputs in the same nine formats.

So if you are starting up a website and you want to convert your small 16×16 JPG file into an .ico file Iconvert lets you convert it to icon file online.

If you want to convert all your OS X Icon files to load up on your Vista machine then again this is the place to do it. In the past I have tried small programs that say they convert image formats but they all had to be installed. Now you can simply visit this website and convert away to your hearts content!

Let’s check out the website and see how it works. I am on a Windows XP machine with SP3 installed. But as I said before, anyone with a browser can get down on the converting.

I decided to use my Admin guy JPG that you can see in the image above. If I want to use this little guy as an icon all I need to do is browse on over to the iconvert website (which is not iconvert.com by the way).

From here, I simply clicked on Browse and looked for an image that was either .icns, ico, .png, .svg, .tif, .jpg, .bmp, .tga or .cur. I found my image that was in JPG format and clicked away.

And in no time at all I was returned to the same page except it had web links to download my new icons! Check out my results here:

And that is all there is to it! Can you imagine it would be so simple? This works on any web browser and you can then email or IM someone the link as well. Try it out here is my link for a windows .ico file. This can be a very handy resource and let’s all hope the author can get a domain name for it!

There is one small thing to keep in mind – the icons that you convert will be displayed at the bottom of their home page as “Recently Converted Icons” so you might not want to create one out of naked pics of your girlfriend confidential pictures if you know what I mean!

Do you have a favorite on-line resource that you use to convert icons between formats? If you do we would love to hear about it in the comments! C’mon we would tell you!

Snapter – Scan Your Documents Without A Scanner

Damien Oh — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:01:26 +0000

Other than taking photos, what other use do you have for your digital camera? With Snapter, you can now use your digital camera for another purpose: turn it into a mobile flatbed scanner.

Snapter is software that lets you use a digital camera as a mobile scanner. With the shots that you have taken, the software automatically crops, stretches, flattens images of documents into portable images and make them seem as though they have been scanned on a flatbed scanner.

Some of you may be wondering: since you already have a digital camera to take snapshots, why do you still need a software to do the conversion? Well, there are several advantages in Snapter. First of all, it comes with a perspective correction that can take a slanted/disoriented image and rotate it to the right orientation.

Secondly, if you are taking snapshots of pages of a book, it can be really difficult to read the text from the raw images. Snapter has the ability to split the pages into two different images and correct the curvature distortion.

Thirdly, Snapter enhances the images and make them easier to read.

Snapter supports images of different forms. You can use it to convert snapshots of documents, notes written on a whiteboard, namecards or pages from a book. The following screenshots show the tests that I have done with different materials and the results are very satisfying.

Here I printed out a copy of one of my articles that I wrote for MakeUseOf. I took a horizontal snapshot of the printout and input it to Snapter. It successfully rotated the image to the correct orientation, cropped the side and sharpen the image for easy reading.

Next, I took a snapshot of two pages of a book and input them to Snapter. It detects the curvature of the book and splits the pages into the left and right page. Similarly, it crops and sharpen the images for easy reading.

There are both free and paid versions of Snapter. You can download the free version and enjoy the full functionality for the first 14 days. After that, the software is still functional, but it will add a tagline and light watermark on your images. If all you need is to convert the images to a portable version so you can read while on the move, the free version is good enough for you.

If you want to use the result for your commercial project and you don’t want to have the watermark, you will have to get the paid version which cost $20 (Lite version) or $49 (Full version).

Capture.NET: A Swiss Army Knife For Your PC [Windows]

Varun Kashyap — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:01:58 +0000

So how about a tool that is “an exquisite, powerful and multi-functional desktop utility. (It is an) All-In-One, Multi language, Simple and Standalone (no install).”

Sounds interesting? Well that is what was quoted on the developer’s site and instantly caught my attention. After trying it (and ignoring minor quirks in UI and spellings) I must say I have not been disappointed.

I am talking about capture.NET. The tool is aptly called the Swiss army knife of PC tools because it just does so many things. I must confess that after looking at the site and its presentation I was a little wary of malware. However I submitted the file to VirusTotal and the results were 0 positive on 38 engines, so I went ahead and double-clicked to launch.

The tool has a Professional Version and a Free Version. The Professional version requires you to pay $15 for a license. However the Free Version is quite a handful in itself. The features I am discussing are all available in the free version. If you need something extra than you may like to have a look at the Professional offering.

Let’s just have a look at some of the features that capture.NET has to offer:

Screen Captures

Capture.NET allows you to take screenshots. Just like some of the commercial applications you can take screenshots by isolating windows, regions or take full screen grabs. The tool offers you a zoomed in view of the screen to help you precisely grab just the area you like.

Basic Image Editing

The captured image is then presented to you within an image editor, where you can do some basic editing. The image editing features include the ability to:

Crop
Rotate
Add edge effects like shadows, torn edges, soft edges
Convert pictures to Ascii (Cool!)
The basic cut, copy paste, save etc

Post it Notes

Capture.NET provides you the capability to post notes on your screen. Just hit Ctrl + Shift + N and type in your note. You have now got an instant sticky note. You can also manage your sticky notes from the context menu accessed via the tray icon.

A Privacy Eraser

A mini tool that allows you to clean temporary files, the recycle bin, clipboard, cookies, MRU lists, Windows Events Logs and perform some minor tweaks like clearing the pagefile on shutdown.

A Color Picker

A great tool for web designers and programmers. The color picker allows you to pick any color off the screen. It also provides you with sliders to generate color schemes or if you are really stuck, hit the random button to get a random color suggestion.

A File Format Convertor

This allows you to inter-convert between the various image formats. Just browse to images you wish to convert on your hard disk, select all images that you want to convert and choose the appropriate command. File Format Converter also allows you to convert chm files to html files.

A Tweaker

Tweaker allows you to perform some basic registry tricks on your system. It provides you with detailed information about your system and ready access to the device manger and the Windows System Information utility. Tweaker also has options to restore the settings for a hijacked Internet Explorer.

A Backup Expert

Backup Expert allows you to backup your mail (Outlook) as well as Internet Explorer favorites and feeds. Though honestly I missed Firefox support here.

Alarm Clock, World Time, Timer and Time Synchronization

Apart from the basic alarm clock functionality, the tool also offers count-down/count-up timer and time synchronization with a NTP server. You can also view the different time zones and time differences readily accessible through keyboard shortcuts.

Some Other Utilities

There are plenty of other features offered by capture.NET which I would have to leave for you to explore yourself. Some of them are great for programmers like the customizable Ruler or the Window Spy which gives you important information about windows, buttons, and other UI elements. Indispensable if you are into writing Autohot key scripts, Windows Programming or something similar. Others like the font viewer, calendar and lunar phases are more for your general use.

Definitely give it a try and let us know which ones you liked or if you use any other tools for accomplishing similar tasks.

Top Online File Converters (Video, Audio, Images …)

Aibek Esengulov — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:20:36 +0000

They are free and yet have a lot to offer…

Zamzar

Zamzar is a free and all-inclusive (video, music, images, documents) online file converter. In 4 quick steps you can convert almost anything to anything else; (1) simply enter a file you want to convert by pointing to its location on your local drive or address on the web(ex; youtube video), (2) select output format(eg. PDF, doc, 3GP mobile, iPod, PSP…), (3) enter email address where it should send converted file and (4) convert it.

Special features:

supports all popular video, music, image and document formats. More details
provides browser bookmarklet(Firefox, IE) which lets you convert and save files from any webpage.
convert and save any video while you are watching it(supports Youtube, GoogleVideo, Myspace, Revver, PutFile, Break.com, Apple, Trailers, Dailymotion, Metacafe, iFilm, Grouper, Blip.tv)
file size can’t exceed 100 MB

Media-Convert

Media-Convert also lets you convert all types of files, i.e. video, music, images, docs and archives. It’s also free and supports almost all conceivable file formats. Procedure is pretty much the same; select the file, specify output format and let it do the rest. Once it’s done with a file, it will provide you with a link from where it can be downloaded.

Special features:

each converted file remains accessible for 6 more days, so if you want to share it with friends you can forward them a link to download page.
input file format auto-detection(no need to specify input format)
additional option to adjust conversion settings(like fps, bitrate, codec, audio rate, etc..)
download file directly to your mobile via WAP or GPRS.
file size can’t exceed 150 MB

Mux
Mux lets you convert youtube and googlevideo videos to following formats; mpeg-4, Quicktime, iPod(m4v), flash video, windows media, mpeg-1/2, windows avi, 3gb mobile and OGG Theora. It’s not as powerful as above mentioned zamzar or media-convert however it has some handy features that you won’t find with others (see below).
Special features;

for more demanding users there is a power mux which allows users set additional settings on output file(bitrate, fps, file length…etc).
there is also a mux mobile which lets you convert web-videos to mobile format(3GP, AMR) and instantly forward them to any mobile for free.