Sharing recent vacation pictures with your friends has always been a lengthy process. First of all, you have to create a new account with the free image hosting services, upload all your images, and then you will be able to share them with your friends. Today we are presenting a cool new program that can easily shrink and upload all your images with a single click, without the need of creating a new account.

Tiny Upload is an Adobe Air application that can easily shrink all your images and upload it to the Tiny Upload website with a single click. Now you don’t need image editing apps to shrink your vacation pictures for sharing them with your friends.

Just drag-n-drop all your photos or complete folder into this program, select thumbnail and image size and then click on upload. All your images will be resized and uploaded to the Tiny Uploads website within few minutes. You will get a short URL after all your images have been uploaded. You can share this URL with your friend.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

This program is simple and easy to use, but personally, I found something missing in this program. If by chance, you lose your album URL, then there is no way to recover it back, unless you haven’t cleared your browser history. All your images will be lost forever.

I think this program should have a “My Account” section, where it should store all the URL’s of the albums which we have uploaded earlier. Except this, all other features of the program are awesome. It will definitely save your precious time. Since the URL is short, you can share it with your Twitter friends as well.

Techie-Buzz Ratings: 3/5 (Good)

[ Download Tiny Uploads | Download Adobe Air ]

Following Windows XP’s release, Microsoft had released several tiny applications called Powetoys for Windows XP. Although TweakUI went on to be the most popular Powertoy, there were many other gems like Image Resizer. Image Resizer enabled users to resize a picture or a group of pictures from the right-click context menu.

Unfortunately, Microsoft discontinued the tradition of releasing Powertoys with Windows Vista. Image Resizer Powertoy Clone is an open source application which brings the functionality offered by Windows Resizer to Windows 7 and Vista. It resizes selected images without altering the original image. You can use any one of the four preset sizes or specify a custom size. You can also ask Image Resizer to modify and overwrite the original image, in case you want to save space.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Image Resizer is good at what it does. If the specified output resolution doesn’t match the original aspect ratio, it will resize the image without altering the aspect ratio. In such cases Image Resizer will ensure that both the width and the height is less than or equal to the specified value. From what I could tell, Image Resizer doesn’t save images at 100% quality settings. This keeps file sizes in check without any perceivable loss in image quality. Image Resizer’s biggest strength is convenience. It has its own limitations, but is excellent for quick resizing tasks.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

[ Download Image Resizer Powertoy Clone ]

If you have a high resolution camera, you may know how hard it is to share the files with your family and friends, because of the large sizes of the images captured.

However we had told you about a Image resizer earlier that resized images on the fly that you send out using emails and IMs, however if you are looking for a tool to resize images on the desktop, Photo resizer is a freeware utility that serves the purpose.

Photo resizer eliminates the need for having bulky photo editing softwares, as it quickly allows you to resize photos, without the need to have professional skills.

Resizing images with Photo resizer is very simple, just open the image you want to resize and resize the window, that’s it, once you are done resizing the window, click on the save button and your resized image will be ready, no need to specify height or width, just mouse movements will allow you to resize the images.

Definitely one of the simplest photo resizing tools we have ever come across.

Download Photo Resizer

Taking photographs on your camera is quite a fun thing to do, but having to resize each and every image so that you can easily share them with your friends and family is definitely quite a pain.

Camera Images can be of pretty high resolutions which in turn shoots up the size of images to 2 or 3 megabytes each, sometime even more, now if you have taken 100 photographs imagine the amount of time you would spend to resize those images to a sharable resolution and size.

Multiple Image resizer is a handy freeware that will allow you to resize multiple images at one go. The software allows you to resize a single image or add multiple images from folders to be resized. In addition to that you can also scan the harddrive for images.

With Multiple Image Resizer, you can resize, add borders, add text, overlay images, crop, rotate and flip – with a few simple mouse clicks.

Multiple Image Resizer Features

• Resize, rotate, crop or flip images
• Add borders to images
• Add text to images
• Overlay / Watermark images with another image
• Preview of unprocessed and processed images
• Ability to save and load image processing settings
• Ability to alter the order in which batch processing features are applied to images

Multiple Image Resizer is free for personal and educational usage. If you are Windows XP user, the Microsoft Image Resizer Powertoy does the job pretty well, and also provides you with a right click context menu option to resize the images, however the Image Resizer Powertoy does not work on Windows Vista.

Download Multiple Image Resizer for Free

If you plan on sticking with Windows XP for as long as you can, there are a lot you can do to optimize it and better your XP experience. Even though a lot of us are guilty of not performing it, basic maintenance is essential. If you don’t already do so, you should run Disk Defragmenter (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter) or another defragmentation tool on a regular basis. Not only will this speed up hard drive access times, but it will reduce the chances for data and operating system corruption. If you add regular anti-virus and anti-spyware scans to your maintenance regiment, you will keep XP running for longer periods of time without error. Performing maintenance is not all you can do to keep XP running optimally. Microsoft has also released some free tools that will help you use Windows XP more efficiently.

Microsoft’s SyncToy allows you to synchronize data between folders. This utility is easy to use, and it will allow you to quickly set up synchronization rules, and ensure that your data integrity is maintained while synchronizing. This is especially useful when synchronizing files between a flash drive (or external hard drive) and your desktop or laptop. It is easy to use and freely downloadable from Microsoft.

ClearType Tuner allows you to control how fonts are displayed within Windows. It allows you to better control how dark, crisp, and smooth fonts will be displayed on your system.  After installing this application and running the setup routine, fonts are displayed much more clearly, kern better on screen, and I have experienced less eye fatigue. This free tool has really changed font management and display in Windows XP for the better.

Microsoft’s Image Resizer allows you to resize images without opening an image editing application. Once it is installed, it places a Resize Image option on the context menu when you right-click on an image. You can choose from 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, or 240×320, and once you choose your desired size, the application makes a copy of the image in the desired size without changing the original image.

These are just a few of the free applications that Microsoft offers to enhance the Windows XP experience. They will save you a lot of time and money while allowing you to get the most out of Windows XP.

Digital cameras have become a common place today, and sharing photos even more easier. But the fact that the image sizes are still quite large makes photo sharing a bit harder.

Imagine having to send several images that are more than 4-5Mb in size, and to top it the fact that most free email services do not allow attachments more than 20MB in size. So in order to send out 20 images you will have to compose 4 different mails. Agreed that there are several image sharing sites, but many people may be unaware about those or simply prefer to use images.

Shrink Pic is a free and handy utility that automatically compresses the image size on the fly when you send a email, while you share a photo using instant messengers or upload images to the Internet. Shrink Pic allows you to send dozens of photos as email attachments – quickly and with no effort at all!

Shrink Pic runs in the background monitoring images, when it detects that you are that you are sending a large image, it will create a temporary file and resize the images according to the settings you have chosen. There are several compression options you can choose which will help you reduce your photos.

We did give a try to Shrink Pic and saw little or not quality loss with the image, making it a perfect utility for us, since we deal with tons of images on a day to day basis and compressing them manually is quite a pain.

Supported Platforms for Shrink Pic

Shrink Pic works with several applications and browser, here is a complete list of applications that Shrink Pic supports.

Web Browsers

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Opera

Email Clients

• Outlook
• Outlook Express
• Thunderbird
• Eudora
• Poco Mail
• Incredimail

Instant Messaging

• Skype
• MSN Messenger

Overall looks like a great utility to have and a must have for anyone dealing with several images throughout the day.

Shrink Pic [Via Life Rocks]

How many times have you come across a wallpaper that is not the right size for your desktop? Do you simply setup the wallpaper even though its resolution does not match your desktop resolution?

There are tons of services which will help you make your image sizes smaller than their current resolutions while providing same or lesser quality but what if you want to increase the size of the image to a higher resolution? Have you been able to do it without degrading the image quality?

Reshade is a solution which allows you to resize your image without losing any quality. The major factor that makes Reshade better than others, is the fact that it allows you to increase your image resolution up to 20 times without incurring any loss of quality of the images along with the normal features of down sizing your image resolution.

How Does Reshade Work?

Reshade has both a online and offline version using which you can resize or enlarge the resolution of your images.

Reshade Online

Reshade Online has a easy to use interface and you can resize your images up to 3x times from the original resolution. Using the free online version you need to choose a image from your computer or provide Reshade with a URL to the location of the image.

Once you have uploaded the image you can choose the resolution you want to resize it to along with having options to center the image, stretch it and more. I gave the service a try and found pretty good results with the online image resizing.

This is the original image I used to resize to a bigger resolution, the original image size was 341 x 126 pixels

Below is the image resized to a resolution of 800 x 295. Click on the image to view the full image.

As you can see the quality of the image is almost intact and that is why Reshade can be quite a useful service for you.

Reshade Offline / Desktop Tool

Reshade also has a pretty useful desktop image resize tool which will allow you to increase the image resolution by up to 20x times which is quite good indeed.

The Reshade desktop resize tool allows you to easily resize image from the confines of your desktop. There are various options you can choose from while resizing a image. You can either use the zoom option or enter in a size you want to resize in the image to. In addition to that you can also control the quality, smoothness, texture, accuracy and threshold of the resized images.

The Reshade desktop resize tool has quite a simple interface and can be used by anyone without going through much trouble.

Reshade Desktop Resizer Features

• Innovative scaling algorithm – allows for over 2000% enlargements with no loss in clarity
• Easy to use interface – simple adjustments, with quick preview
• Fast access – use keyboard shortcuts to open and save files
• Drag and drop – open files directly from your Internet or file browser
• Multiple file types – support various formats including JPEG, PNG, bmp
• Standard image modes – can use CMYK, RGB and grayscale images
• Video tutorial – see a quick intro to the Reshade features
• Automatic updates – get notified when a new version is released

Innovative Processing Tools

• Control – have the best control over image clarity. Remove blur and highlight curves
• Soft Edges – get smooth, precise and consistent contours for all "Edge Control" values
• Smooth – remove image defects easier, directly from Reshade.
• Texture – extract even the finest details from your images. Contrast and enhance image features
• Accuracy – go from smooth edges to perfect estimations of the original image lines
• Threshold – make selective edge transformations
• Best Edges – get even better color estimation with just a little more processing time
• Quality – choose between speed or better quality for the resized image

The desktop tool is not available for free though and the price for it is $149 per license. The folks at Reshade are offering the desktop tool at a 51% discount, so you can get the product for $74 if you purchase it before 25th June.

Summarizing

Reshade definitely provides users with a nifty feature that many image resizers do not provide you with. So the next round if you have found a perfect wallpaper for your desktop which does  not fit the resolution of your desktop you know where to head.

This is a definite must have tool for designers and photographers so go ahead and download a free trial and if you like the product purchase it before 25th June to get a 51% discount.