Using FastStone Image resizer - Freeware (www.faststone.org) select the folder to be processed (top right) under output format options set the quality (80% seems good for 99% of images) Under advanced options tab 'resize' set width to 800 pixels and tick preserve aspect ratio - set filter to use (B-spline,FastLinear,Hermite,Lanczos3,Linear,Mitchell,Nearest,Triangle, Bell, Bicubic, Bilinear or none) - pick appropriate algorithm for subject material. other tabs which may be used include: rotation, cropping, setting a canvas, adjustment (brightness,contrast,gamma,hue,saturation,lightness,RG &B adjustments, sharpen, invert and grey scale), set dpi, add text (set transparency, colour, font, offset etc) , watermark (select image, shadow, offset etc) - use as required. press start job done :-) example: 108 files, 196 Mb set to 800 pixels width, use lancozs resample (slowest, sharpen 12, add overlay text right bottom corner, save 81% quality. time:2 min, 39 seconds. at 1.3Mb it's comparable to irfanview, has a prettier interface though but the images are more artifact ridden using the same algorithms (odd) than irfanview - and it's much slower. Nice for it's pretty interface though.. Of course my advocacy still lies with running the image through a stripping program to minimise the image sizes without impacting on image quality - my preference lying with jpegcleaner (which gives you the option of GUI or command line application) download the freeware: http://www.rainbow-software.org/download/jpgcln26.zip "JPG Cleaner is simple but powerful utility for cleaning JPG files from anything that is not picture data. Commonly used programs such as Adobe Photoshop are writing additional information into JPG file that isn't needed for correctly displaying the picture. Texts such as "File written by Adobe Photoshop, Creator: PolyView® Version 3.32 by Polybytes, LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01" Picture previews (sometimes even bigger than main JPG data!) Color Management data All this data is useul only when opening the file in program that created it. Other programs such as Internet Browsers are just skipping this data, so the data is downloaded ant then thrown away! Just use this program when publishing JPG files on the Internet and your JPG files become smaller (if they contain non-picture data) with NO QUALITY LOSS. Usage of DOS and W32Console versions is very simple. Just type jpgclean.exe picture.jpg to clean picture.jpg file or jpgclean.exe *.jpg to clean all JPG files in current directory" to use, drag and drop folder into the pane and press 'go' picture previews?? really?? do programs actually write images within images? Man, THAT would explain some of the massive bloat I've removed from images in the past! k
