PhotoTrim for Windows

If you have a digital camera, it doesn't take long to fill your PC with lots and lots of high-quality images, some of them huge in size. Fortunately there's no shortage of free photo-resizing software, ranging from small and speedy tools that emphasize automatic operation and batch conversion to full-fledged graphics tools rivaling some pricey packages. EasyNote's PhotoTrim definitely hews to the simple-is-better philosophy, offering basic settings and speedy batch conversion as well as some compression. Unfortunately, it's not exactly free: you have to register to unlock "advanced" features such as cropping. Add in some clunkiness and an absence of basic features, and it's hard to see how it can go toe-to-toe with top downloads.

PhotoTrim is fully portable, running without requiring installation from virtually any location, including removable drives. It has a simple interface with two tabs, Resize Photos and Rename Files. You must add the first file in a directory; after that, clicking arrows scrolls through the batch. We loaded some images, which appeared distorted to fit the preview pane. PhotoTrim's interface made it clear the preview wasn't the final image, but the inability to present a simple preview in the original image proportions wasn't exactly reassuring, nor was the inability to configure the view. The program offers no list view or proof sheet view; you must click through a batch one by one.

Still, we were able to change the brightness and contrast and set the image reduction by percentage of the original. We made our selections and clicked Change and Save Current Image, hoping for the best. PhotoTrim requires that you save images to a different destination than the source folder, since it reuses file names. Pop-ups alerted us to the tool's progress. Opening the destination folder revealed a neatly resized image. PhotoTrim's compression processing can't be changed, and you may need to experiment to get things right. The features on the Tools menu are unavailable in demo mode. The File Renaming Tool offers simple batch renaming, but it's not enough to earn PhotoTrim a recommendation when compared with free tools that do more things and better.