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.

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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?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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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!

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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).

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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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.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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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.

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