News :: 15MR: Media Resizer v2.5

Greetings and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Media Resizer version 2.5 by Sibental, Inc.—An application for resizing images and video files alike.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“This powerful and flexible, yet easy to use utility will help you to resize thousands of your pictures. Media Resizer quickly and easily prepares your image collections to be published on the web. Media Resizer supports both Image and Video Formats that gives you a wide variety of ways to create the coolest thumbnails!”

Quick Pros

• Unlike Watermark Factory from same creator, this one doesn’t crash on certain images
• Very quick to produce resizes
• Interface is simple but effective
• Allows you to take screenshots from a video

Quick Cons

• Strange spotting effect seen on two photos out of 183
• Doesn’t resize videos, only extracts screenshots
• Even though the description ‘hints’ (Doesn’t directly imply) there are disabled features in this version

Expansion

With the grove of ‘resizers’ that have been popping up on Giveaway of the Day lately, it’s becoming quite a race for this market. While mostly these all work, the race comes down to additional features, speed and ease of use with the interface.

This application does have some benefits going for it. As mentioned above, unlike Watermark Factory from same creator, this one doesn’t crash on the same images I had issues with just a few days ago. This helps with the confidence with this application to use it rather than setting it aside. As well as this, the interface is also very easy to use, and the thumbnailling is very quick as well.

While this application does have some going for it, it isn’t without its flaws. For one, I had an issue with two photos I resized ending up with an odd sporring pattern diagonally across them (They weren’t images that crashed Watermark Factory either) - Click here to see part of the image - It is a bit of an irritant but at least doesn’t bring down the whole process. As well, while the name of the application may ‘imply’ it will resize more than just pictures, it can only extract and resize images from videos, not resize the whole video itself.

The part that got me with the application is that even though the description ‘implies’—”...gives you a wide variety of ways to create the coolest thumbnails!” (does not state directly though) that there are advanced features included in this version. Truth is, is that all this application does is resize and crop images and slides from videos, and that there are watermarking and styling included in this application are disabled for the ‘Pro’ version, which is a staggering $49 over the price of this application, $29.95.

Final Verdict

While I do feel this is likely one of the easiest image resizing applications I’ve used to date, I still had issues with two of my images. As well, this was not the ‘Pro’ version which makes this application more than a basic resizing application. While free, it is a great tool and it is likely to become the application of choice until I can see how frequent the spotting issue is. For $29.95 however, I do feel it is a tad high; I would be more comfortable paying $14.95, maybe up to $19.95. As for the pro version, I feel for watermarking support (Which offers some really good text features as well as graphic features) and the styles, I think $49 more ($79.95 for Pro, $49 for upgrade from Standard) is way overpriced for two simple features that a lot of other resizers support at least partially, for free.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, April 16, 2007