A pleasant pastime like taking pictures and sharing them with friends is usually accompanied by a bit of work that needs to be done in order to retouch and, why not, embellish the pictures to make them more appealing. This task tends to become tedious at times, mainly because of the large number of photos that have to be processed and touched up.
Professional help in handling the issue may be too costly and take more time than one is willing to spend. For this reason, many users choose to take matters into their own hands and do the image processing at home. The list of applications that are specialized on specific tasks or can perform several different jobs in the same time is pretty hefty. All you need to do is pick from the bunch the one that fits your needs.
Insofar as photo resizing and converting is concerned, there is a small utility that was built to yield top quality with little effort and it goes by the name Caldera. You will need to install first the Adobe AIR runtime in order to be able to use it, but chances are you won't regret that. This tool is pretty lightweight at 1.54 MB and, best of all, you won't have to pay a dime for it because it is freely distributed.
The GUI is very user-friendly and great looking, with a nice theme and pleasant colors, while providing easy access to all the functions. At first glance you will notice that this application can do more than just change the dimensions and formats, it also has an image renaming facility that will come in handy to better differentiate the converted pictures from the originals.
Modifying the output size is customizable by ratio using a scale from 1 to 200, fixed width or length with values you will input, but that's not all. This software even has an option for cutting photos to the exact shape you specify. It is a nifty trick for those who want to process an entire batch of images and make them ready for a digital album that requires a particular dimension, for example. Of course, this step can be skipped entirely if no adjustments are necessary for the picture proportions.
To change the name of the resulting files, you have several options at hand. First of all, you will be able to define a custom prefix to all the output photos. To further individualize them, you can also add numbers to the title, with a maximum length of five digits. A special feature for Caldera is the automatic reset function that can be activated to return the start index to the initial state once the operation is finished.
When it comes to the supported image types, this application will handle only three, namely JPG, PNG and GIF. An important omission is the BMP format that is very widespread, but there are others that could have been included here, even though not as often encountered as bitmaps, like TIFF or TGA. Also, there is only one quality adjustment available in the form of a slider ranging from 1 to 100 and it applies just for JPG pictures.
Loading files is a breeze if you are a fan of the notorious drag and drop operation, and if you're not simply use the ''Select folder'' button to append to the list all the items from a directory of your choice. Unfortunately, this utility doesn't search subfolders, nor does it provide another means of individually adding pictures.
If you thought that putting digital photos in the processing queue would be among the first things to do, this software will prove you wrong. With Caldera you must complete all the customizations before adding any files because this action triggers the conversion. The instant you drop a picture or select an image folder, the photos will be transformed according to the selected parameters. And you'd better be totally sure you finished configuring all the settings that will be applied, otherwise there is no undo, preview or pause to save you.
A closer look into the bowels of the actual process immediately reveals the amount of system resources put to work and the news are not so great. The CPU usage peaked at 51 %, but almost all the time it never went under 45 %. Also, the memory consumption reached a maximum of 296 MB which is a lot of RAM to stress for resizing and renaming 66 images that have a cumulated size of 94 MB.
The Good
The smooth interface and clear-cut function arrangement earn most of the points for this software, but not to be neglected is the ease of use with which any user can operate this tool. Another positive thing to be mentioned here is the fact that this software comes free of cost.
The Bad
This application seems be quite a resource hog and it has some lapses in key areas like the support for image file types which needs improvement, at least by including the BMP format. Another downside is the lack of a preview window and of a pause button to allow the user to have more control over the conversion.
The Truth
On the whole, Caldera does a good job resizing, converting and renaming pictures. It can be heavy on resources sometimes, but the process runs smoothly and the output quality is very good. To conclude, it's safe to say that it is a great software to work with if you need to process only a handful of digital photos.
You can download Caldera here
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