M2PicBuddy
Last Updated 17th June 2003
They say necessity is the mother of all inventions... or something like that.
=P My wife just says I have nothing better to do! Anyway when I upload pictures
to the website my steps are:-
- Start Photoshop
- Wait about a a minute or two for it to start up (thanks to old, fragemented,
HDD)
- Open the picture file, crop and resize.
- Save the edited picture.
So I need to wait a minute only to do something that takes a few seconds! :(
So what do I do? Make a PROGRAM!!! ;) And here are the results :- M2PicBuddy!!!
Basically it's just a simple program to crop and resize your pictures, then
save it as a JPG file.. it's what I need and unless people tell me otherwise
I guess there won't be any updates. :)
17th June 2003 : Now with Drag And Drop capabilities! To open a file
drag it from explorer and drop it in the main window area (The grey area,
not preview, not the property bar area)
Download the program here
Since this is a .Net program you'll need to have the .Net runtime installed
on your system, if you do not know wheter or not you have the runtime already
installed just download the program (it's only 117k!) and if you get
an error message when you run it then that means you don't have the runtime.
You can get it
here. (Yes... it's BIG... 20MB worth of data!)
Using The Program
Opening A File
First of all you need to open an image file, to do so just select Open
from the File menu (As if you didn't see that one coming!) You
can now select the picture file you wish to work on, oh and don't try to be
smart and choose a file which can't be treated as an image (ie EXE, DLL,
etc. etc.) The program WILL die when you do that :)
Cropping The Image
To crop a region of the image click and drag out a rectangle on the area you
wish to crop, one note though : Your starting point MUST be the top left
corner of the area you wish to crop out. This is because I was too lazy
to code in the routines for more advanced forms of selection rectangle manipulation.
(Hey, I coded this for my own use remember?) To remove the cropping rectangle,
just click once on anywhere in the image don't drag. Or set CropPicture
to false.
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Speaking of which, this is the property grid where the settings for the
currently selected image. And here's a quick run down of values in it.
| CropPicture |
Wheter or not to crop according to the CropRectangle |
| CropRectangle |
The rectangle to crop the picture with |
| OutputSize |
The maximum sizes for the output picture.
Just enter in a maximum desired value for either width or height,
your resulting image will always be no wider or no higher than the
selected size |
| Rotation |
How to rotate the results |
| Zoom |
Zoom factor of the original image so you can navigate
it better. You need to enter in the format of fractions, therefore
1.0 is 100% zoom and 0.5 is 50% zoom |
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Saving The Results
Once you've done what you want to do with the image, select Save from
the File menu and you'll be presented with the preview dialog
To see the results after conversion to a JPG file, select the Compressed
tab. To change the quality of the final JPG file, change the Quality
value to what you want (Once again, don't try entering a value outside of
1-100) and press the Update button. Est. Filesize shows the
estimated filesize of the resulting image. Once you're satisfied with the results,
click Save and you'll be prompted to where to save the resulting file.
DONE!!
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