Light Image Resizer (known previously as VSO Image Resizer) is a tool for resizing, converting and rotating images. You may think these things are trivial to do in Microsoft Paint, but as you’ll see in my walkthrough of the software below, Light Image Resizer’s goal is to make these things significantly easier, significantly quicker and much better, especially if you’re doing it for a lot of images.
Who is ‘Obviousidea’?
The company behind Light Image Resizer is Obviousidea, a small French software company founded in 2011 and with funding of 500,000 Euro’s (source). CrunchBase also says they have a team of only 1 to 10 people, and by all appearances it does look to be a few-guys-out-of-a-garage type company. The CEO is listed as Fabrice Meuwissen, who appears to be a photographer as much as a software entrepreneur.
Installing Light Image Resizer
Go to the Light Image Resizer website (obviousidea.com) and click the big green download button:
This will download the install file, just under 10MB at the time of writing. Run it and there’s a very standard install process:
Using Light Image Resizer
You can use Light Image Resizer at any time when you right click an image and want to change it. Here’s what the software looks like when it comes time to editing an image:
Click the dropdown menu on the “Profile” option (at the top) and you’ll get a large range of different sizes you can choose to resize the image to. For example:
Quite handy if you’re resizing an image for a specific device. In addition, beyond just resizing an image to X and Y pixels or X and Y percent, you also have the option to set the image size by centimeters or inches.
Beyond just resizing images, here are the other features for Light Image Resizer that come in useful and aren’t available in Microsoft Paint:
- The ability to mass resize and edit images all at once, instead of manually doing them 1-by-1. With Light Image Resizer you can just make it resize all images in a folder to a certain size, for example.
- Set what filter to use. When resizing an image there are various ways to do it, such as through Lanczos filtering or Bicubic interpolation, and they can give you different results (Lanczos filtering apparently yields the best quality, but is slower). Light Image Resizer gives you the option of using 5 different filters you can experiment with to get the best possible result.
- Set the compression quality and size. You’ll probably want to select the option to keep the same quality as the original image, unless you’re really trying to save space.
- Set the DPI resolution.
- Add various effects like inverting colors, converting to greyscale, adding a sepia effect, adding a border or rounding edges.
- Keep the original file date
- Copy all of the image metadata, or only part of it
- Image optimization when resizing (for PNG images, for example, you can make Light Image Resizer use OptiPNG)
- Remove the background (powered by removebg) – you’ll need an API key for this.
Here are a few screenshots of these different options:
And, a few quick examples of the various ways you can edit an image using these options. Take this base image as an example (by default, 2903×1935 pixels, so good chance you’d want to resize it to make it smaller):
Resized to 800×533 (keeping the aspect ration) using Lanczos filtering
Colors Inverted
Sepia Effect
Greyscale
Of course, this isn’t photoshop or anything even close — the main feature of Light Image Resizer is of course its image resizing features, not adding effects to images.
What’s good 🙂 and bad 🙁 about Light Image Resizer
Light Image Resizer has all the features you could possibly want for image resizing, and it’ll allow you to do vastly more than Paint and do it way faster. It’s great that you can set “profiles” (basically a record of all settings) that you can apply to any and all future images, allowing you to do all the manual work you might normally be doing in just 1 click. The main gripe I had with it is it doesn’t show a preview of the new image by default — rather, you have to click a Preview button to see the result of any changes you’re actually making to the image, which seems silly for an image editing software.
Is there a discount code or coupon for Light Image Resizer?
Yes. Purchase through this link (our referral link) and use the coupon code OUTWITTRADE to get 10% off:
Are there any cracks, torrents or license keys for Light Image Resizer?
No.
Does Light Image Resizer come packaged with malware?
I found zero signs of any malware when downloading Light Image Resizer from the official website at obviousidea.com. For some reason, there are a few negative reviews of the software from back in 2012 on CNET complaining about popups and browser toolbars. I assume this was for a fake/bundled version of the software someone submitted to software download sites, and not the official version.
Can I recommend Light Image Resizer?
I don’t think Light Image Resizer is necessary for the average person — Paint or Photoshop will work just fine for your image resizing and editing needs. In my opinion, it’s only photographers and professionals who are working with hundreds of images for hours every day that would benefit a lot from this software, and for those people, Light Image Resizer may be a worthwhile investment at its current modest price tag and our discount code.
