There are many good free image-editing tools out there: Paint.NET and The GIMP are just two examples. But like most image-editing tools, they’re best served when working on individual or small groups of images. What happens if you find yourself confronted with dozens or even hundreds of images? The solution is FastStone Photo Resizer, which has just been updated to version 3.1, and is free for personal and educational use.

FastStone Photo Resizer, which is also available as a portable tool for running on USB flash drives, allows you to select a large group of images from multiple folders, then convert them into a different format, rename them and even perform a host of batch image-processing functions, such as resizing, colour correcting or adding a watermark.

Better still, the program is simple to use: fire it up, then select your chosen images from the left-hand pane (you can switch to thumbnail view if you have trouble identifying them). Click Add, then move on to another folder, adding all the photos you want. A wide variety of input formats are supported, including less universal formats such as EPS and Photoshop PSD.

Once done, you can convert the files into a different format: JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIF and PDF are all supported, covering most bases. You can also rename your image files too – perfect if they’re currently in some obscure format designated by your digital camera. Renaming includes wildcard support, such as * if you want to retain the original filename, or # for one digit of a sequential number.

Access Advanced Options
On its own this might be enough for some people, but the program title does promise photo resizing, and this can be done by ticking “Use Advanced Options…” and then clicking the Advanced Options button which appears. Here you don’t just get the opportunity to resize (either in pixels, percentage or based on one side), you can also rotate, crop and change the image’s canvas size. Add a border, or place a text- or image-based watermark for copyright or identification purposes.

There are also options for adjusting colour depth and DPI, plus an Adjustments tab, where you can change colour balance, brightness, contrast and HSL levels, or convert to greyscale, negative or sepia. New to version 3.1 is an unsharp mask for mitigating the effects of blurring.

Everything can be previewed (the currently selected image in the Input list is used as the example) before committing to any of these changes, which can be mixed and matched as required.

Once all that has been done, click OK then choose Convert to let the program get to work (there’s a second preview button here too, vital if you’re not sure how the effects of your renaming will pan out). It’s all very straightforward, and while you might get more control from your image editor, FastStone Photo Resizer is obviously much quicker on a large group of images, and has plenty of features and enough power to suit most people’s needs.

FastStone Photo Resizer is free for personal use (it costs $19.95 for commercial users), and runs on all flavours of Windows from 98 onwards. It’s available as an installer or standalone portable build.