Photo RAR For WinRAR 2009

CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: CNET staff on November 11, 2009

Photo RAR for WinRAR is a JPEG compression utility that allows users to control the parameters of the compression, including selective compression of particular portions of an image. Although the program looks nice at first glance, using it is at times unintuitive and unnecessarily complicated.

The program's interface is somewhat cluttered, yet it has certain a sleekness that may lead users to think that they are dealing with a well-designed program. This is not necessarily the case, though. Upon closer inspection we noticed that certain tools did not even fit completely within the interface, and there was no way to scroll or resize the interface to access them. This was our first clue that something about Photo RAR wasn't quite right. Using the program was no picnic. The program has multiple potentially useful features, including the ability to set a target file size, selectively compress portions of images, and perform grayscale conversion. Unfortunately, the program's interface makes most major features needlessly difficult; there are many other programs that do the same tasks much more elegantly. The program has functional problems as well; attempts to use one of the selection tools resulted in multiple error messages that meant nothing to us. Even once we got past the error message, the tool didn't work as it was supposed to. The built-in Help file was poorly written. Overall, we were not impressed with Photo RAR.

Photo RAR for WinRAR is free to try, but the trial version does not permit saving. The program installs desktop icons without asking, but uninstalls cleanly. We do not recommend this program; there are many better choices available.

Publisher's description

From WinSoftMagic :

Photo RAR specializes in compressing digital images because this special type of files cannot be well compressed by usual file compression utilities. Photo RAR, based on our Advanced JPEG Compressor technology is able to well compress images in many source graphic formats. Photo RAR makes JPEG image files and can use WinRAR to create RAR archive files. Photo RAR works as a standalone application as well as an add-on to WinRAR. The other important feature of Photo RAR is ability to edit photos preserving their original quality. Photo RAR contains our most advanced JPEG compression engine and technology specially designed to preserve the original picture quality of your digital photos. You can use Photo RAR to edit photos, resize, crop, remove red eyes, add text and watermarks, and more. Photo RAR is the solution for anyone wanting to edit or compress photos and preserve their quality. Photo RAR offers you the ability to create and save 'profiles'. You can use a profile to process one or multiple photos (batch processing) just in several clicks. Use Photo RAR to get your photos ready for the Web: edit, resize, make thumbnail pictures, shrink the large file size of your graphic files, optimize pictures for faster loading from the Web, e-mail smaller image files quickly and not exceeding email size limitations. Digital camera users will benefit most from the new outstanding abilities offered by Photo RAR.

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