EasyCrop Review: Trimming out the Fat
- quick and easy cropping
- great alternative to a photo suite
- lack of "undo" feature can be frustrating
- can only resize constrained proportions
Huge photo suites like PhotoShop and Gimp may offer a completely comprehensive set of photo-editing tools, but it comes at a price. Actual cost asides (Gimp is open source freeware after all) these big programs are major memory hogs. And while it may not really that big of a nuisance when you’re working on a larger project, it’s beyond frustrating when you have to wait 2 minutes for the program to load when all you want to do is crop or resize a photo. Yellow Mug Software has heard your cry, and they’ve responded with EasyCrop.
Rather than being a small feature in a giant software suite, EasyCrop is a standalone program that can handle all of your cropping and resizing needs with little more than the click of a mouse. Unlike PhotoShop, the program loads up in seconds. Simply drag any image — be it on your desktop, in a folder, or even in your browser — into EasyCrop’s left window. Use your mouse to select the area you want to crop and it will appear as a cropped image in the right window. Drag that new image to your desktop and voila! You have a freshly cropped image. From clicking on the EasyCrop icon to having a newly cropped image file can take you less than 10 seconds. It’s glorious.
While EasyCrop doesn’t offer up much more than this, you’re also present with the ability to resize your new photo. A slider will let you adjust the size if you just want to eyeball it, but if you know the sizes you need you’ll be able to pop in those numbers too. The resizing always keeps things in proportion, so you’re not going to accidentally stretch things out and make your image look wonky. Mind you, if you’re looking to stretch things out, you’re not going to be able to accomplish it with EasyCrop.
Images can also be sharpened and saved in different formats if needed (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF). A few other perks like the Destination Drawer (which lets you save up to six locations to store your newly cropped files at the click of a button) and the built in screen capture tools make this a rather meaty offering for such a no frills presentation. The program has a number of little handy extras like this, but it doesn’t offer anything that doesn’t make sense. EasyCrop is light on frivilous add-ons and big on sensible extras. Asides from these little tweaks, EasyCrop is a program that does little more than live up to its name. It’s easy. It crops. That’s it. And that’s all it needs to be.
The only complaint we had was with the lack of an “undo” feature. If you fiddle with the adjustments a little and want to revert to an earlier choice, you’re stuck. It’s a strange situation, and one we hope to see remedied in future iterations.
While there could be any number of smaller features included in EasyCrop, that’s missing the point. EasyCrop succeeds not because of what it does, but because of what it doesn’t. By stripping away all the needless bells and whistles that so many photo editors come bundled with, Yellow Mug Software has designed a photo editor that focuses on a single task and handles it effectively and efficiently.
EasyCrop is available from Yellow Mug Software for $11.95.
Actually…simple cropping and colour rendering can be done using the Preview program. To crop, just select the area and press cmd+k.
Is this a joke?
$12 for this, when at least 2 apps that reside on every Mac will do it for free? Even if you argue that this app is more convenient, in what universe is this worth $12?
I think Yellow Mug is on yellow drugs.
I LOVE this application. Its not fancy or expensive, but its does exactly what I needed it to do. Yes Preview will allow you to crop an image, but you can not constrain an image, EasyCrop does this. I use this along with EasyFrame sometimes when I want a bit of pizazz to the image. I own ImageWell too, but I’ve found EasyCrop much faster and easier to use and overall fewer steps to crop down a photo. To me YellowMug is one of the few software companies that seems to price their software reasonably, far to many slap $19.95 or $30 on a simplistic application that should be more like $12.
The screen capture function was something I didn’t know about until after I bought it, now its what I use when I need a quick screen cap.
Pixelmator.
Done.
Hmmm… I like small apps like this, and for a blogger a resizer is certainly an important tool.
But how about trying out Imagewell.
It has been doing this for years now, and for FREE.
- Jens Poder
ImageWell is a good app but its not free, $19.95 – I have it and use it but more steps to crop a file than using EasyCrop is I’ve found.
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