Free app for resizing photos?

[lvlln]

I like the Incredible's 8MP camera, but hate the huge resulting filesize that makes it inconvenient if not impossible to upload the photos anywhere. Is there a free app that allows me to resize photos to resolutions I want?

I tried Picsay, but the free version only allows it to be resized to a a tiny resolution, making it useless. I know Photoshop.com, but I've heard that it runs constantly in the background no matter what. I just want a simple app where I can punch in the x and y dimensions (and maybe a checkbox to choose to keep the ratio) and have the image resized.

 

[dmitriyk]

I've written an application that, as part of uploading photos to Flickr, resizes them. It turns out that resizing an image (especially an 8MP image) is really, really, really difficult on Android. You basically have to re-implement the JPEG compression and decompression algorithms to do it.
It's not impossible, and I'm making some progress toward it, but just know that it's not exactly straightforward.

If you do find something that works well, let me know.

 

[ReverseYodelin]

Try RY Batch Resizer It is free and do what you need

 

[chanchan05]

Hmm, how does having a large file size make uploading impossible? I've been uploading full 5mp pictures to photbucket with no problem, and I don't think an 8mp picture has that much size increase compared to 5mp.

 

[Chip_365]

I've tested 3 of these programs for my needs & I settled on "Reduce Photo Size" app as the best of these but still not perfect. They ALL suffer from reduced image quality when the image is reduced, unless the image is NOT going to be viewed on anything other than another phone. These programs do notseem to apply any sharpening after resizing & they should. Ideally they should allow user control of sharpening, either with scaleable input or several choices of say, light, medium, strong or edge sharpening.

RY Batch Resizer had for ME, poor quality or blurred outputs, it was VERY SLOW & the free version had ADS (I personally HATE Ads as they use up data. I'd gladly pay for a decent app & do, but free to me means Try Out first. I'd rather have reduced features for testing an app than Ads & RY Batch Resizer Free has both, reduced function & Ads.) RY Batch Resizer is so slow on one image that I can't imagine batch resizing many images.

Image Shrink Lite was also had poor quality or blurred reduced images. It's functionality was also poor for my needs.

Reduce Photo Size was slightly better than the other two for image quality it was otherwise better too. Sadly the free version also has Ads. It is what I use if I have to. I turn off my data connection before using the program to prevent Ads.

Currently, there are NO really good image resizing apps out there IMO. They all have poor image quality for reduced images & none offer user selected or controlled sharpening & for photo apps, they should.

However, you all may be less critical of image quality & so any of these programs will work, but RY will still likely be the slowest.

 

[aldal12]

thanks for the overview, chip! i've been looknig into finding a good photo resize app for awhile.

i don't mind ads all that much so i have been thoroughly enjoying reduce photo size! thanks

 

[tcat007]

I use the resizing in Quickpic. Lets you pick the reduction, or input a custom crop size. I don't pay attention to jpg compression on a phone, for anything serious I use my PC and PSE... dropbox makes that easy. But for a quick FB upload, I just resize/crop to 800 x 480 (res of my Galaxy Player).

 

[Chip_365]

I use QuickPic as my gallery app & overall it is excellent for me. BUT, the image resizing is probably as bad or worse than all of them for output quality. I emailed the developer & while he replied, he basically blew off & ignored my comment.

For better quality reductions I use Photo Enhance Pro but it's not free, as it does do sharpening & mid tone contrast, BUT, neither the amount of sharpening or mid tone contrast are user controlled other than in the overall app settings, so that makes it cumbersome for quick work. After that, one has only 2 choices for output, quick for Web, & High Res. The devleoper says he's too busy to do much more tweaking of the app. It also has other quirks that could be fixed.

If you don't want any control over sharpening, then Photo Enhance Pro is very quick for outputting a small for web reduction, but you have no other control & I don't find the end quality any better or worse than Reduce Photo Size.

I wish that QuickPic would offer sharpening control, but the developer doesn't seem interested, even though the app does do some sharpening of the image view of gallery images. Weird.

Overall, these photo app developers are NOT photographers & have little idea or care about the quality of the images & image outputs. They seem to be more interested in the software of the app just being somewhat functional. I get vague replies when I make suggestions about improving output quality that leads me to guess that they just don't give a &^% about quality, of both the app & the images. But still something is better than nothing. I just wish that they'd stop offering crap gimmicky apps with poor image outputs vs. something simple & of quality. I guess people just want to be entertained with crap eye candy even with a utility app?

If one uses QuickPic as your gallery app, then that may be the fastest workflow for resizing but to me the image quality is poor. If you don't use QuickPic, then my tests have shown that Reduce Photo Size is the best option so far & I've tried MANY apps in search of the Holy Grail.

 

[tcat007]

I agree, but I only use phone camera photos for the net and image quality is not too noticeable on a phone (unless zoomed). It's usually the phone camera that's got the poor quality, not always the software (can you really see sharpening effects on a 3-4" screen?). If I do have a photo I think is worthwhile, I just dropbox the original and edit on my PC... there I can see how bad it really is. I'll give RPS a shot, thanks!

edit: Just tried Reduce Photo Size and the 800x480 image from it looks worse than the 800x480 from Quickpic. The RPS image has a 30% smaller file size, meaning it's compressed more. I have RPS quality on max. I'll stick with Quickpic for stuff that doesn't matter... pretty much all phone or FB shots. QP left, RPS right, QP seems to have less noise: (1:1 off 800 x 480 crops from each software)

 

[Chip_365]

Thanks for the update. I also just compared the 2 & like you found QuickPic quality to be better. The developer may have changed something in a recent upgrade 'cause reductions used to be very poor IMO. The quality is also better than my convoluted way of using Photo Enhance Pro. Thanks!

Yeah I'm not sure why there are 3 threads on resizing. I added my thoughts to was as the RY person did too, & RY, at least in my past tests, was not the best as the poster thought. I used my HTC DHD.

 

[tcat007]

I also noticed a blurb about Skitch for Android | AppBrain.com at Techcrunch. Anyone tried it? Might be good for the poster asking about captions.