Today I'm going to mention two FREE and useful tools for working with photos that I sometimes recommend to clients.
Firstly, a batch image resizer. Relentless progress means that your digital camera is probably now capable of taking picures of up to 12 megapixels. This has left many estate agents storing photos that are much bigger than they will ever have any use for.
There are advantages to having bigger images from better cameras of course - you've generally also got a better quality lens, and importantly, you've also got the option to crop the image down to focus on a smaller area, remove a problem feature and produce a better end result.
Getting back to size though, a full page A4 photo is approximately 11x8 inches. To print a good quality copy, say 240dpi, requires an 5 megapixel image (2640 x 1920 pixels). Other than for high end properties, how many of you use full page A4 photos? No, thought not. For a more typical 8x5" image, the size of the photo required drops to just 2.2 megapixels (1900 x 1200).
And that is many times the biggest photo you will realistically need to display on your website (perhaps 1024 x 748).
For estate agents uploading lots of property photos into their web-based estate agency software, cutting the size of the files uploaded (by as much as 60-70% if using a modern digital SLR camera) is a real time saver.
This free image resizer from VSO software is for Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 and can process photos in batch, so that you don't have to change the settings on your camera. Very handy.
Secondly, a web service for converting images into different formats, http://www.zamzar.com/. How often have you ended up with a PDF version of your floor plan, which you need to save in an image format (jpg, gif or png) so that it will display properly on your website or in your property brochure?
ZamZar's free service just requires you to complete 4 simple steps on their homepage. An email is sent to you when your converted file is ready to download. It takes a short while for the email to come through, but if you're using it a lot, there are paid accounts you can sign up for.
Hopefully these will prove useful to you. Do you have any other must-have tools you'd like to share?
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