The 7 Best Online Image Resize Tools For Quick Web Posting: Review

What are the top 7 super-fast digital image resizers that allow you to very quickly resize an picture of photo for blogging or posting? To compare these different sites, we focus on the ability to resize as we need, and on workflow speed. But - we will give extra points if we can also crop, round corners for a good web2.0 look, and watermark - all of them common needs when posting on the web.

• #7 PicResize gives you a very simple but decent looking interface, multiple download options, and the ability to access drpic's impage editor when done with resizing. However, you have to click one more time to preview the result, and it does not let you pick quality. No option for watermark, cropping or rounded corners.

• #6 QuickThumbnail, with very basic interface (= ugly...), gives you different ways to scale, and can output multiple size pictures. It gives you basic watermarks, as well as a few effects (greyscale, sepia, blur and a few more) but no rounded corners. Downloading is done through a right click.

• #5 PicMarkr  is a watermark editor - but it can also resize to some standard dimensions. A good choice of watermarking abilities, very simple, very fast - no choice of quality for the JPG output. You download with a right click. It is the tool of choice if you primarily need to watermark, and, accessorily, have some limited resizing needs.

• #4 ShrinkPictures has another basic, but quick and effective interface which allows you to simply pick the new size and image quality, and gives you greyscale and sepia choices. No watermark or 2.0 rounded corners. Overall a solid choice for pure resizing needs.

• #3 RoundPic is a superfast corner-rounding application which also resizes your pictures. You can pick the corners you are rounding. You can pick the JPG quality as well. The output file is given a random name, so you need to reenter a file name before downloading :( It is an excellent choice if your sole needs are resizing and rounded corners.

• #2 Rsizr (through Lifehacker) is a brilliant, very clean web app, which resizes and crops, but also *retargets*. Retargeting subtly changes the proportions of your image so that you can bring parts of it in prominence while pushing other, less interesting parts into smaller scale, seemingly without losing the whole effect of the picture. You can make what you want bigger, yet keep the original content without cropping - hard to explain, but you can read about it here, or view it here. When downloading as a JPG, you can pick the quality. No watermarks or rounded corners.

• #1 WebResizer (through gHacks) is a well rounded little app with a decent interface, which allows you to very quickly resize an image, and, optionally, crop it and round it (no watermarks though). It is very effective at giving you image quality and size choices to optimize final image bandwidth. It also remember your last choice and applies same criteria to the next image. It gives us the fastest workflow commensurate with a decent feature set, and it is our ultimate winner as a fast image resizer!!!

A smart desktop utility solution

While we focus here on online tools, there is a truly smart Windows utility, Shrink Pic, that deserves to be mentioned. The genius of it is - it runs in the background! It automatically resizes all images you email or upload to a predefined template - no more manual input. A good introduction to it can be found on AddictiveTips.

What did not work for us:

• Resizr had a poor interface, functionality that did not exactly fit what we needed, and a lot of commercial adware interfering with the use of the site. In fact, we believe that its ads might include active malware. If you are paranoid -as we are - you might want to avoid the site altogether.
• iResize workflow was slow and awkward.
• ResizeYourImage had a good looking 2.0-like interface but did not do what we needed it to do, although we love the big rounded buttons! The application is simple but surprisingly non-intuitive in terms of exactly what the buttons will do for you - and - it does not allow you to easily resize to the size you want... It does not respect scale, and does not give you storage quality choices. It is a better cropping app than a resizing app.
•  ResizePic has the simplest interface - really too simple in this case. You need to enter both target widths and heights, which warrants elimination in our eyes.
• ResizeImage.org has a basic and and advance resizer. The basic resizer is too simple. The advanced resizer is purely drag-and-click - sometimes very useful, but does not give you the ability to give pixel sizes.

In the next few days we will review the best and fastest online image editors for web posting or blogging... So come back soon!