Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Lightweight Image Editor

I've been impressed with how much mileage I've been getting out of my thumb drive lately. But, as I've quickly learned, its 1 Gig capacity simply isn't that big. So, I've started for looking for ways that I can free up some space.

First, I removed the pocket version of a Pocket Firefox. While exceedingly cool, I can survive a session of IE if I need to.

Next, I got rid of 7 zip. Again, it's a cool app, but most windows boxes already have a zip program, and I can usually grab one if I need it.

Finally, I thought about removing The Gimp, but I really like the idea having an app where I can crop and tweak images. But still, at 26 Meg, it was an expensive choice.

So, I poked around and came up with IrfanView. As Wikipedia says:

It can crop, resize, and rotate images. Images can be adjusted by modifying the brightness, contrast, tint, and so forth, and by converting them between formats. Many of these changes can be applied to multiple images in one operation, using batch processing.

And, it does all this and weighs in at about 1MB. Just what I was looking for.

I also added an app to the thumb drive: hugin. Hugin is used for making panoramic photos. This is something I'll actually use while away from my computer, so I thought it was worth the 31 Meg it costs.

4 comments:

  1. What about Google's Picasa?

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  2. Nick -

    That's a good idea. Picasa seemed more appropriate for a setup where you always store the photos in the same place (on the same part of the drive, for example).

    But, I may be wrong about that. I'll keep it in mind as an alternate.

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  3. Both GIMP Portable and InfranView seem like good choices for me to try on my Dell Mini. Just really looking for something to crop and edit screenshots, but something to tweek photos might not be bad either.

    BTW, I keep all my photos on an external drive and tried using Picasa to catalog them. Didn't seem bad at first, but then I realized it was taking up 400MB+ of storage on my Mini hidden in my user profile (the Application Data folder). So much for keeping everything external.

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  4. Kris -

    That's good to know about Picassa.

    I think for cropping - Infranview is wicked fast. But, for tweaking, the Gimp should go a long way.

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