By Dr. Nicholas J. Kinar Published on June 25, 2020

Image Browsing and Resizing Software

Palais des congrès de Montréal (Montreal Convention Centre). Photograph by Nicholas Kinar.

There are some software packages that I use daily to examine and resize images for academic research, paper-writing and photography. These are completely free of charge.

FastStone I mage Viewer is a remarkable freeware image browser. It supports a plethora of formats and has never crashed when opening an image. I use this daily.

FastStone Image Resizer is excellent for batch resizing, cropping or conversion of images. This is freeware GUI-based software that is useful if you want to quickly do resizing without writing a script.

For script-based work, ImageMagick is useful for batch file conversions, but a thorough Google search is often required to find working examples. FFMPEG is similar to ImageMagick, but operates on video files. These two command-line based utilities are FOSS (Free and Open Source) software.

If you use Mac OS X, the ImageMagick and FFMPEG utilities are available for your operating system. The image viewer Phiewer can be useful for browsing images and BatchPhoto can be used for resizing.