Fast Image Editing

I’m not going to ditch Photoshop the way I did Dreamweaver. Photoshop actually deserves a little bloat. But sometimes it’s way too much for simple tasks, especially when it comes to blogging. I’ve been experimenting with a few little OSX apps for doing everyday tasks and thought I’d share my favorites.

Resizing

I love the simplicity of the ImageShackle dashboard widget. You can just pull an image onto it, tell it what size to constrain it to, and it will make a ready-to-go version on your desktop named with the size of the image so you can make multiple versions without having to enter any names. I can pull images right out of iPhoto onto my desktop, then drag them onto the widget and have a photo ready for my blog.

ThumbsUp is excellent for batch processing. A beauty of an app it isn’t, but for quick resizing of images and creation of thumbnails, it’s really pretty good. ImageWell can handle batch processing with the paid upgrade.

If you’re going to pay, though, EasyBatchPhoto is a doozy of an application. It lets you set all kinds of resizing and cropping settings, which you can save as presets, and then just drag your files onto a drop spot. It will ask you where to put them and just go to town. It costs about $25USD but is available as part of a bundle that will save you some money on a few other useful apps (and some not so useful).

Cropping

EasyCrop, also from Yellow Mug Software, adds cropping, rotating and drag and drop simplicity as well as screen capture. This is a great, lightweight application that pretty much has only the features I need and ALL of the features I want. It’s great for quick and easy cropping of a photo, with some quick rotation, resizing and screen capture tools built in.

Conversion

OSX Preview can save in multiple formats. Just open an image and choose “Save as.” You can export to PNG and JPG from most Preview compatible formats. EasyCrop, EasyBatchPhoto and ImageWell all save to multiple formats. EasyBatchPhoto really shines here, as I usually have a whole folder of images to convert.

Of course, GraphicConverter X, while not the prettiest app, is excellent for converting all of those exotic image types and can handle batches. When a client sends me a file that even they can’t open, that’s usually my solution.

Screen Capture

Screen Grab. Once again, the built in tools do a great job. I always forget the shortcut keys for screen grabs, but handle with care”>Quicksilver with the image capture actions enabled keeps them at my fingertips. I can capture just a window, convert it with Preview and resize it with ImageShackle, and create a preview just like the one on this paragraph…

SnapNDrag adds some simplicity to screen capture, putting all the options in one dialog and letting you drag the final file to wherever you like rather than leaving scattered files on your desktop.

Handy Tools

Dimensionizer is a little contextual app that lets you get (and copy to the clipboard) the dimensions of a graphics file. This is a lot handier than even popping up an info box.

Favicon Editor is currently my favorite way to make favicons. It’s an online editor that allows you to upload a 16×16 png or just draw one pixel by pixel if you’re fastidious and\or bored.

Paparazzi! is a screen capture program for websites. You can set it up with a bookmarklet in your browser and launch it with a timer to snap great, full size or cropped shots of a page. I use it to document versions of a website as I modify it.

My Dream App

I’ve done a little ImageMagick\Rmagick programming for TextMate that lets me create thumbs and resize images on the fly with drag and drop commands. Sometimes a dialog is nice, though, and I’m pretty sold on EasyBatchPhoto right now. It can handle all of the simple tasks that I hate loading Photoshop up for. Cropping, resizing and converting. I don’t need my image app to upload, that’s built in to my blogging software and when I’m designing for the web, well, I’d be pretty bad at my job if I didn’t have a good FTP setup.

That’s where I’m at with my research right now. I’d love to hear about anything I’m missing!

blogging» Geekery» images» Photoshop» quicksilver»