RIOT

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 22, 2010

We've often found ourselves needing to compress or resize an image but feeling reluctant to fire up a full-featured photo editor and deal with its attendant hassles. RIOT is a no-frills way to get images ready to be shared via e-mail, social networks, instant message, or anywhere else smaller files are needed.

The program's interface is plain and not particularly attractive, but it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Two preview panes display the original image and the edited one. Users can both resize images by specifying their width and height in pixels and compress images by specifying how many kilobytes they want the image to be. Brightness, contrast, and gamma can be adjusted, and users can specify whether they want various types of metadata to be included in the new image. Images can be saved in JPEG, GIF, or PNG formats, and we are happy to report that the program supports batch processing. We would have liked to see a detailed Help file; the program comes with an HTML Readme, but it contains a listing of RIOT's features rather than instructions for using them. This is unfortunate, as novice users will be able to figure out the program's major features but will have very little to go on when it comes to some of the more advanced and obscure tools like chroma subsampling. For the most part, though, RIOT is easy to figure out, and we think it's a great option for adjusting image size, compression, and quality without a lot of fuss.

RIOT comes as a ZIP file, but installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.