QuickScale: Just Another Batch Resizer?

Have you ever wanted to send some of your great vacation or family photos to friends? Nowadays, email is the best and easiest way to do this. With that said, there are still a few setbacks to using email; you usually want to name the pictures with a pattern and resize them so you are able to send them. Sure, you could use Preview for both of these, but it just takes way too long. Well, if you want to add these on the fly, then I suggest you check out Coding Mammoth’s QuickScale.

As said above, the main two things that QuickScale does are batch renaming and batch resizing, so I will talk about these first. QuickScale has two resizing engines that you can use: Default and CoreImage. You can specify which one to use in Preferences > Graphics > Scale Export Engine. The default engine will get you much better speeds, but at a cost; the images are not as smooth. The developer wrote a blog post about these differences here. Because of this I have always used CoreImage to do the job. I prefer quality over time.

In QuickScale you can specify either a percent to scale to, or a size. If you want more control over the actual size (in pixels), I suggest that you specify a size. On the other hand, if you know that you want to scale it to a certain percent, by all means use the percentage scale.  QuickScale also gives you some scaling options: Normal, Stretch, Box, Crop, and Mixed. Normal will scale the image so it fits in the frame that you specify. Stretch will scale the image to the new size without keeping the proportions. Box will create a frame with the given size, and in this frame your image will be centered and scaled. The result is like the normal-export method, but with a size as wanted. It is also possible to give the background a color. Crop is a mix of the 3 methods above; it creates a frame with the given size. The image will be fit into this frame, but in such a way that it gets cropped. Mixed is the same feature as normal, but it doesn’t work with the height or width. Instead, it works with the longest and shortest size. For example, say you have two pictures, one portrait and one landscape. With this function, QuickScale will handle both images as the same, like you rotate one of the images. These different methods make it easy to get what you want, but can take a bit to really stick to your brain.

QuickScale’s batch namer is very simple.  You just hit Edit Custom Name in the main window, and the options window pops up. You can specify something that will be in every image (like DSC_), and then tokens based on the image (like index, new size, old size, etc.). Once you have specified how you want the images to be named, just hit OK. If you like choosing how many digits your index number will be, then with QuickScale you are out of luck, because it does not allow you to do this.

A great feature of QuickScale for publishing pictures to the web is watermark support. You check Add Watermark, and then hit Edit Watermark. You can choose what it says, the text styles, the location on the image, margins and even background color. The background color will only be applied to what is in the margins of the watermark. However, if you add a watermark to a small image, sometimes your scaling options will be off. There is also no way to choose a rotation for the watermark, which is a feature you see in almost all watermarking apps. Then again, QuickScale is not strictly a watermarking app.

One last thing that I was very impressed by in QuickScale is its interface customizability. In its preferences you can choose colors for things like the background, border, title, etc. You usually don’t see these in many apps, so I am very impressed with this. And speaking of the interface, I think it is extremely clean and easy to use, another thing you don’t find in that many apps. And ever further onto this not, I just love the icon!  Thank you Laurent Baumann for making yet another amazing application icon!

QuickScale, by Coding Mammoth is a great tool for batch resizing, renaming, and more! You can pick it up from them for only $15! I have used it for a while now, and it is definitely worth it when you compare it to the competition.