I’ve got all the fancy photo editing programs a girl could want (well, I’ve got two, Photoshop and Lightroom, but I think that is pretty much all you need), and I know them well and love them both. They do have their faults however, the biggest being that they are expensive (although I did qualify for the student discount) and that they are big fat memory hogs.

One evening I asked That Husband to do a Google search for me, which resulted in the discovery of my new favorite program: FastStone Photo Resizer.

I was going to type out everything that this nifty little program does, but the official website already handled that for me.

Features

* Convert and Rename images in batch mode
* Support JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and JPEG2000
* Resize, crop, change color depth, apply color effects, add text, watermark and border effects
* Rename images with sequential number
* Support folder/non-folder structure
* Load and save settings
* And much more…

Some of you are scratching your head saying “What does that mean?” My friends, I will show you.

Let’s say I’m editing a photo of the oh-so-cute Molly and Jonas. I get excited about the picture I’m working on and decide I want to upload it to Facebook straight-away (if you want to see my latest work very first, be my friend on Facebook, I upload pictures there all the time!)

I export the file as a JPG, but it still needs a watermark, and oh, yeah, it’s HUGE. I don’t even know if Facebook would accept a file that size.

I open FastStone and use the left window to navigate to the file I just exported. I select it, and move to the middle pane and click “Add”.

I choose the destination for the photo under “Output Folder”, and I click on “Advanced Options” in order to resize and add a watermark.

Under Advanced Options you can do a variety of things. Resize, rotate, crop, lighten, add text, add borders. You get the idea.

If you are confused about what options to choose int his pane, just go ahead and choose all of the same settings that I used (the “Switch Width and Height to match long sides” option is very important). For That Wife I make my photo 650 pixels on the longest side. For Jenna Cole and Facebook I make my images 900 pixels on the longest side.

Then I click on “Watermark” across the top menu, and activate the watermarking function by checking the box in the top left corner. In the photo above, the “Watermark” menu option isn’t green like it is in the photo below. This is a great feature of FastStone, as it quickly allows you to see which options you have activated with a quick glance.

I hav a .png file on my hard drive that I always use as my watermark. Using the “Position” drop down menu I can choose where I want the watermark to appear on my photo. There are also options to add a drop-shadow to the watermark, change the opacity, etc.

I hit ok, and then click “Convert” in the lower righthand corner of the main screen. The dang thing converted so fast that I didn’t even have time to hit Print Screen before the status bar had reached 100%. It’s that fast!

I closed out of FastStone, opened up this post, and navigated to the Output Folder I had designated earlier.

And here is the final product:

So easy!

Want to know something funny? I used FastStone to resize all of the screenshots I used for this post. I don’t think I could live without that program anymore!

I realize that Photoshop is all powerful, and that you can create an action to do these very thing. But can you process hundreds of images at one time with Photoshop? Nope, your computer will freeze before you are even able to open 20 of those 100+ images you nee dto resize/watermark. No more waiting a minute or more for Photoshop to boot up each time I want to resize an image, it’s FastStone to the rescue!

I think it’s obvious that I love this program, and I think you will too. Did I already mention that it is FREE! Download it here!

Editors Note: Despite appearances, FastStone did not commission me to write this post. I sound like an overenthusiastic vaccumm salesman because I love the product that much. Sometimes I gush to That Husband about it. Other time I gush to myself about it, out loud, when I am all alone. I love you FastStone.