One of the aspects of submitting software reviews to HubgPages that has long bothered me is putting together screen shots. Not because taking a screen shot is hard, because it isn’t. And not because the process with HubgPages is difficult, because it isn’t (although I wish they’d accept images in PNG format!), but because it’s a bit tedious.
Especially on a Mac. Why? First of all, is because the Mac, by default, takes screen captures in PNG format. PNG stands for Portable Network Graphic, and is typically a bit more efficient than JPG (not to mention being completely unencumbered by patents, which JPG can’t say). So, even if I have my screen shot perfectly framed and cropped, on a Mac that screen shot is in PNG format, so I still need to convert it to JPG.
That’s not too difficult. Simply open up the graphic, click “Save As,” and pick the format I want… simple.
But time consuming! Not so bad, really, if I’m only submitting one or two screen shots, but if I’m submitting an article with the maximum five screen shots, and I’m submitting more than one article at a time, that can be a lot of images.
So I’m happy to report that I stumbled on a great image utility for Macs that I think is going to make my life a whole lot simpler. The name of this application is ResizeIt. As you can guess from the name, the main function of ResizeIt is to resize images. And it does this great. Simply drag an image on to the ResizeIt icon (or open ResizeIt and you’ll be asked to select an image to change). You can resize the image by giving exact pixel dimensions, a maximum size, or by percentage.
But you can also choose a different format. ResizeIt is able to convert to JPG, PNG, TIFF and GIF, all with the click of the button. And this is great, so what I’ve realized is that I can simply use ResizeIt – not to resize anything – but as a format converter.
How do I do this?
Simple. In the areas where I could pick a way to resize my images, I simply leave them all at 100 percent. Then I click on the format dropdown menu and select JPG. And here’s the nice part. I now save this as a preset, so in the future I just drag and drop, hit return, and I’m all set!
ResizeIt offers a couple other nice features as well. If I’m confident enough that the conversion will go exactly as I envision, I can simply choose to have ResizeIt overwrite the existing images, which will simply replace them with an image of the same name, except for the new format. Or if I want to make sure everything turned out the way it was supposed to, I can have ResizeIt save my new images in a different place.
I’ve named my preset “JPEG” so now whenever I convert images (and choose to NOT overwrite the originals), ResizeIt puts a folder named “JPEG” on my desktop, with the converted images inside. Brilliant and simple.
I love ResizeIt. I’ve been using it for the last couple days, and it has always done exactly what I wanted, behaved exactly the way I thought it would, and was fast and simple to use. If you’d like to give ResizeIt a try, head on over to its home page, and give it a download. I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do. ResizeIt is a free utility.