Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

Nearly everyone has a digital camera these days, and it’s never been easier to snap off a quick photo and upload it to your website or email it to a friend. The only problem is, not everyone appreciates your 4MB mega-image in their inbox. So it pays to resize images, optimising them for the medium you’re going to use them in.

Last week I came across a great little Adobe Air application called Shrink O’ Matic. It’s a completely FREE cross-platform desktop application that allows you to drag and drop an image into the application’s workspace and resize it for the web. As I often get clients complaining that they can’t get their 5 gigabyte folder of photos through to me for uploading onto their site, I thought a few people might find this very useful.

Step 1 - Download Shrink O’ Matic

Shrink O’ Matic is a free application that can be downloaded from the Shrink O’ Matic website. On the home page of the site, you’ll see a button labelled ‘Install now’. Clicking the button will advise you that the installation is about to begin.

If you don’t have Adobe Air installed on your computer, the installer will do that for you too. Once the installation starts, simply follow the prompts, until eventually you complete the installation and the Shrink O’ Matic application launches.

Step 2 - Working with Shrink O’ Matic

Once the Shrink O’ Matic application launches, you’ll be presented with the following screen:

At the top of the application screen you’re presented with a 3 options, which need to be correct before you import your image for resizing. Let’s go through them one-by-one.

1. Output size: Here you can determine the physical dimensions of the image you’re resizing, either by stipulating dimensions in pixels, or by using a ratio percentage relative to your original image.
2. Output name: In the second option pane you’re given the choice between saving the output image with the same name, or renaming it (I’d recommend renaming your images so you don’t overwrite the originals). While it’s not shown on the screenshot above, there is also an option to ’specify an output folder’ which allows you to save your resized images to a specific location. I generally opt for the Desktop so I can find my images immediately.
3. Output format: You can choose to change the format of your image or leave it the same. If you’re resizing photos, your best option is to choose JPG and adjust the quality down to around 50%. This will give you a final image that’s optimised for the Web.

Shrinking images

So you’ve set up Shrink O’ Matic’s preferences just the way you want them, and now you’re ready to resize an image. You can either drag and drop an image from your Desktop or a folder into the bright yellow window, or click on the Browse button and search your computer for your image.

Hey Presto! You’re done. If you navigate to the output folder you selected in step 2 above, you should find your resized image. I’ve tried a few images from my digital camera, and the output sizes are perfectly suitable for the Web and emails.

If I had one request for the Quentin T, it would be to allow cropping of images. It would probably make the application a lot less intuitive, but it would allow a bunch more versatility, and I wouldn’t need to open Photoshop quite as often. For the casual user or website owner, there’s really no simpler way to make sure your photos are suited to the environment you’re using them in.

Do you currently use an image resizing solution other than Shrink O’ Matic? I’d like to hear if there are any other free solutions out there that are better. Let me know in the comments.

One comment so far. Your turn.

Recently I bought a copy of iBusiness Promoter (IBP), a tool to help with website optimisation. Now, before all you hardcore SEO’s start jumping on your high horses about the value of this type of software, let me point out a few things:

1. I am not a professional SEO. I hire people to handle SEO for me on my clients’ sites.
2. I have used this software to increase my website traffic substantially in the past 4 weeks.
3. IBP helped me spot a simple, yet major flaw in my online marketing strategy.
4. The recommendations IBP made to change my site are the exact same recommendations my outsourced SEO guys made, so either the software is awfully clever, or SEO is dead-easy and the pro’s have been lying to us all these years.

The fact is that IBP is a great piece of software for small businesses trying to succeed online. One of the features I like the most is the software’s ability to generate a ‘Top 10 optimisation report’, which is a fairly lengthy (up to 60 pages) roadmap to help you get a top 10 ranking on Google.

The report simplifies exactly what needs to be done to a site, allowing website owners to focus on the important stuff. If you’ve been struggling to find your feet online, you might want to try Axandra’s iBusiness Promoter. It’s only available for Windows, so Mac users will have to find a PC to run it on.

Get a free Top 10 Optimisation report

If you’re a bit hesitant to buy the software without giving it a try, I’m giving away a Top 10 Optimisation report to 5 lucky website owners. Simply fill in the form on this page and I’ll let you know if you’ve won. Entries close on Monday the 8th.

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I’ve had a couple of people asking where I find the images I use as headers for most of my blog posts, so I thought I’d blast off a quick Friday post to explain.

I generally use the following resources for free and royalty-free images:

1. Stock.xchng - free and royalty free photos.
2. Flickr - using the creative commons attribution license. I’d suggest you read Skellie’s explanation here before you go swiping images from Flickr.
3. iStockphoto - in my opinion, the best online resource for cheap royalty-free images.

If I can’t find what I want on these 3 sites, I generally create the image from scratch or snap off a couple of photos. For client projects where someone less cheap than me is paying the bill, I’ll do a Google Image search and buy the image from any of hundreds of other stock image suppliers.

And finally, when all else fails (like today), I’ll just ‘forget’ to add an image all together…

One comment so far. Your turn.