Simple Resizer

Why?

Many reasons:

Privacy
Strips out metadata that reveal your phone model, the date and time you took the image, and sometimes even where you took the image! Why share all that information with data miners if you don’t have to?
Economy
Resized images can be dramatically smaller; it is not unusual to go from images larger than 10 megabytes to ones smaller than 100 kilobytes. This means lower data charges for you.
Speed
A dramatically smaller image is one that transmits dramatically faster when sent.
Little Cost in Quality
I will spare you technical details why, but cell phone cameras tend to have noisy pixels, and this noise, more than the total number of pixels, tends to be the limiting factor. So throwing away some pixels by downsampling often throws away far less meaningful resolution than one might think. Plus, while screens are improving, they are still limited compared to a physical print when it comes to resolution; yet another reason one does not need all those megapixels.
No More Sideways Images
Again, I will spare you the technical details, but images saved by Simple Resizer eliminate the problem of an image displaying right-side-up on your phone, yet coming out sideways when shared on the Internet.

Running Simple Resizer

As its name implies, this is a simple program. Start it, and you will be allowed to choose an image to work on. Alternatively, you can send images to Simple Resizer from another program. There are buttons for each of the four main operations: resizing, rotating, canceling a session, and completing a session.

If an image needs both resizing and rotating, it is best to resize first. This will result in a smaller image, so rotating will happen faster and consume fewer system resources.

Simple Resizer is smart and will always do non-distorting resizing. Unlike many resizing programs, it wont let you resize a portrait mode source image to a landscape mode target size (or vice versa).

Simple Resizer supports most standard small-to-midsize output image sizes, as well as any custom size you choose. When you choose your own custom size, you are specifying the length of the major axis; the minor axis length will be chosen for you to create an undistorted result. For example, scaling a 4608 by 3456 image to a major axis of 1000 creates a 1000 by 750 image.

By default, Simple Resizer creates high-quality output, On slower phones, this means resizing might take a few moments. If you want faster results, you can choose to optimize resizing for speed instead of quality in the Settings for this app. Image processing geeks might be interested to know that optimizing for quality uses “Lanczos 3” resampling, and optimizing for speed uses “bilinear” resampling.

Note that quality is subjective! Going for speed can often make for sharper-looking results, which some may prefer. But the cost one pays for this sharpness is for repeating patterns and fine diagonal lines to sometimes show undesirable artifacts.

Another item you can configure in the Settings is the JPEG output quality. By default this is 85, where 0 is the most compression and the worst quality, and 100 is the least compression and the best quality.

“Cancel” means to abort this image-processing session without saving anything. “Done” means to save and quit. (Note that sharing implies saving, because a resized image must first be saved in order to be shared.)

Note that your original images remain intact. Simple Resizer makes resized copies of your images; it does not replace large, high-resolution images with smaller downsampled ones.

Privacy Policy

First, in general I take the privacy very seriously. Privacy is in fact part of the motive for my writing this app, as one of its functions is to strip out possibly privacy-compromising metadata from your images. As such, it is a key design principle that the Simple Resizer application does not collect any information on its use or on those who use it. Since no such information is collected, there is none to share or protect. I have no plans to change this aspect of Simple Resizer.

Second, although the Simple Resizer app itself does not track its usage, the servers you download this app from, including any servers run by myself, are a different matter. Pretty much any public server on the Internet logs all of the following information to log files that are at least semi-permanent:

  1. The Internet address of the device making the request.
  2. The time and date of each request.
  3. The URL of the resource being requested.
  4. Information about the user agent (i.e. web browser) used to make the request. This information often includes the operating system used to host the user agent.

Again, virtually every server out there logs all of this. If this is big news to you, consider yourself informed. Also, I still do in general take privacy seriously; I have yet to share details of my server logs with anyone else. To date, I have only used my server logs for testing, debugging, and planning, and I hope it stays that way.

Third, the author of this program is an anti-fascist and an anti-authoritarian. If you use this app in any way to advocate white nationalism, fascism, or other forms of violent authoritarianism, and I learn of such use, I will consider it my duty to share information on downloads, should such sharing be obviously helpful to the anti-authoritarian cause. Aside from that, it will probably take a warrant or a subpoena to get me to share any specific information on downloads.

Finally, any changes to this privacy policy will be published here.

Support Me

I have written Simple Resizer as free software in the hopes that it will be useful. If you agree, you might want to consider a donation to my PayPal account. I am also available for hire as a technology professional.