Tip. Trick. Mod. » Quick Tips

Why ‘Preview’ is the best batch photo resizer for Mac

Steven — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:32:24 +0000

Apple’s own image-viewing app, Preview, has quite a few other tricks up its sleeve – and one among those is that it’s actually the best batch photo resizer for the Mac. Plus, it’s free, and you’ve already got it installed on OS X.

This resizing skill has been somewhat overlooked because it’s a bit buried away in the menubar under ‘Tools’. But, in my usage of it, I’ve found it to be flexible and useful – surpassing shareware apps such as EasyBatchPhoto, and rather lacklustre freeware apps such as iZoom or PhotoDrop.

Before you start resizing with Preview, though, be aware that Preview will overwrite your current files, so have back-ups ready in case you don’t like the results. So, here’s how to get Preview.app to resize a bunch of photos…

1. Open the images that you’d like to resize, in the Preview app.
2. This is important: select one image, so that the thumbnail in the sidebar is highlighted blue, then do a ‘Select All’ (hit: Command/Apple and A) so that all the thumbnails are highlighted in blue.
3. In the menubar, navigate to ‘Tools’ and then click on ‘Adjust Size…’ (see image, below):

4. Now the Image Dimensions box appears, and you can now choose how you’re going to scale all your photos. I usually take my overly-large 3648 x 2432 photos down to a more manageable 2400 x 1600, which also reduces the file size by nearly half, without any perceptible loss in quality. (see image, below):

5. Once you’ve picked the right dimensions, hit ‘OK’ on that Image Dimensions box.
6. Wait for the images to be resized, as indicated by the progress bar. This could take a few minutes for very large files, or hundreds of images.
7. Nearly finished… But, wait, because the new images have not yet been saved. Navigate to ‘File’ in the menubar and click on ‘Save All’. A progress bar appears as the images are saved. (See image, below):

Ta-da…!

OK, all done. The only caveat is that landscape- and portrait-oriented photos and images need to be done separately, which can be a bit of a pain.

So, that’s how the Preview app can save you money and get your photos resized with no loss of quality, saving you time on uploads, and space on your hard-drive.

Improve Vista’s Start Menu

Ryan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:07:53 +0000

If you’re a little befuddled by Windows Vista’s start menu and it’s general lack of any sort of organization – check out Vista Start Menu, a freeware program (with a pro upgrade) that enhances the Vista start menu.

On top of the organizational and customizational benefits, the Vista Start Menu’s developers have taken into account the human brain’s cognitive abilities and limitations – particularly that your brain is darn good at using visual memory to find stuff.

h/t to Tekzilla for the tip.

How to Find GoDaddy Promo Codes

rick — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:44:15 +0000

I don’t buy many domain names, but when I do buy a dot-com I usually try to track down a promo code to save a few bucks on the usually $9.99 price. I’ve found the best way to do this is to search twitter for promo codes that have recently been tweeted:

Twitter search for “Godaddy” + “Promo”: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=godaddy+promo

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for that search result as well.

How to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome

Ryan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:13:07 +0000

When I migrated my browsing habits to Chrome a couple weeks back one of my big holdups was that Google Chrome didn’t have a Delicious plugin for quickly bookmarking links.

However, with just a tad of javascript you can correct this Chrome shortcoming.

Simply drag the following link to your Google Chrome Bookmarks bar:

Delicious Bookmark

Now, when you want to bookmark a page on Delicious, simply click the bookmark. Easy, huh?

Sadly, unlike Firefox’s plugin, this does nothing to integrate Del.icio.us bookmarks with Google Chrome’s bookmarks, but hopefully a fix for that is not far away.

Tip credit to Ninja Plan.