Free Photo Converter

Free Photo Converter

Practically everyone’s got a digital camera or a cell phone cam, and hard drives everywhere are filling up with unsorted megabyte-size snapshots. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of free photo tools, either. PixelApp Studio’s Free Photo Converter is an example. It’s a compact, easy-to-use application that you can use to resize photos and convert their formats, singly or in batches.

Free Photo Converter’s colorful interface is very easy to understand and use; while there’s no built-in Help file, just a link to the product’s Web site, one is hardly needed. The right-hand control panel is divided into three boxes: Resize, with separate pixel settings for both height and width and an option to maintain aspect ratio; Output Format, with choices of JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and TIFF and a JPEG image quality option; and Preserve EXIF, which copies EXIF metadata from the original image when selected. We clicked the large Add Picture button, browsed to a folder, and selected four images, which appeared in the program’s scrolling thumbnails display above the main view. We selected one image, chose a size, selected Maintain Aspect Ratio, chose a destination, entered a new name, and clicked Save. The new image appeared instantly and appeared to be a perfect copy of the original, only smaller, when we opened it in Photoshop. Next we tried a batch format change, which involved selecting a range of images and clicking Batch Output. Again, Free Photo Converter instantly converted the images and did a fine job of it, too. We’d like to see a lossless rotation feature but understand that you have to draw the line somewhere in a simple-is-better design.

There are lots of free photo converters out there, and they tend to take differing approaches to the job; some emphasize power and features, while other are designed to be as easy to use as possible. Free Photo Converter falls into the easy-to-use category. For most users, it’s all they’ll ever need.