How One Missing Feature Can Screw Up 15+ Products
I’ve been following online photo editors since they first appeared. I’ve even created an in-depth review of 6 most promising such products. After that, many new products appeared - I reckon there’s over 15 free online photo editors out there. And at least 5 of them have lots of features, good usability and speed - in short, they’re all around solid products.
But I will never use any of them in my daily work.
It’s simple: they lack one feature that might seem too abstract or too complex or not necessary to the developers, but it’s essential to me (and, I guess, thousands of other users): crop & resize at the same time. You know, it’s that thing in Photoshop where you set your crop area to some predefined size, and whichever portion of the image you select with the crop tool, it will get cropped and resized (up or down) to the exact size you’ve selected in the toolbar. I need this feature because I work for the web; on most web sites, you have some predefined image size that you use, and you want to fit as much visual information in it as possible. I reckon most online journalist can’t do without this feature; if they don’t use it, they should; it’s a life saver.
The reason why I remembered this is because I’ve just found about yet another online photo editor, perhaps the most full-featured of them all, called Cellsea. The first thing I tried to do, of course, is crop a portion of the image to a predefined size. And, of course, it doesn’t work. It crops, but it doesn’t resize.
Once again, no crop&resize.
So, all in all, I’ve tried over a dozen free online photo editors, and should they all amount to nothing in the end, I will consider it to be due to the lack of this one simple feature. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this way. Or, maybe all those developers that created all these photo editors were all wrong to omit this one feature. It happens sometimes, you know.
Once again, it’s back to Photoshop for me.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:00 am
I am not sure that I understand what are you missing here but crop the image and resizeing it to a wanted format works just fine on www.cellsea.com.
S poštovanjem,
Nenad Petkovi?
December 18th, 2007 at 10:47 am
@Nenad: yeah, it’s hard to explain, although the feature itself is simple. It does crop to a certain size; but it doesn’t resize the selected area to a certain size at the same time. Photoshop does that.
December 19th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
so basically its about folding a crop and a resize task/action into a single “tool”?
December 19th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Yes–if you fully understand how Photoshop’s crop tool can work, you’d understand. With Photoshop’s crop, you can either just crop (the default function), OR you can type a set pixel size in the crop’s width and/or height settings on the toolbar, and when you do the crop, it’ll also resample the image to a different size.
So, say I had a large 7MP image I wanted to crop down to 300 px wide, but didn’t care how tall it was–I just wanted to keep the aspect ratio correct. I’d select the crop tool (or hit C), type in “300″ in the Width header (leaving Height blank) select what I want to crop, and hit Enter.
The resulting image would be 300 pixels wide, and the height would be determined by the original image aspect ratio.
This is extremely handy for web-graphic designers who get paid by the hour.
December 20th, 2007 at 6:44 am
Great point. A lot of times we forget how important the simple features are. I’m with you—I’m sticking with Photoshop.
December 27th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Just to make sure I understand, do you mean that you have an image of size 700×600 and it must fit in a region of 300×400 so you want a function that will resize the image to 467×400 and then crop it to 300×400?
January 5th, 2008 at 8:50 am
What you’re asking for is something that CAN be done in most other software, it just requires the user to go through two separate steps. So you,re asking for them to write a very specific function which in all honesty really IS only important for web developers. Sure, the writers of all these other software packages COULD do it, but if they start putting every little function that every little person feels is ‘important’ into their software…. their software will soon become a bloated, overly complex behemoth that is almost tooooo complex for the typical user, kinda like…..oh maybe PHOTOSHOP?
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