digital Picture frame resizing and crop program and stamp utility

[hartiberlin]

Hi All,
probably many of you have also donated some of these
new digital picture frames to their families and/or loved ones.

The cheaper ones come in 7 or 8 inch size and
are said to contain a pixel resolution of 480x234 pixels.

I also had to work with 2 of these digital picture frames over Christmas
and they both had more resolution to fill their 16:9 aspect ratio display.

Indeed the best resolution for them is 480x270 pixels,
as then there is no black border around the picture anymore...

So how do you get from your 3:2 or 4:3 format digital pictures
these 16:9  pictures with 480x270 pixels
without destroying the aspect ratio ?

Well there is a very nice freeware program that can do an
automatic cropping.

It is called:
Image Cropper
and can be downloaed from:

http://www.darkwood.demon.co.uk/PC/crop.htm


With it you can crop out these 16:9  sized 480x270
pixels very nicely and can work in a batch mode
and interactive mode, where you can shift a
WINDOW of 480x270 pixels over the source image
and then get the rescaled and cropped image out as
a JPEG image.
Also you can stamp it with some explaining text
over it and you can also rotate and color correct the pictures.

Very nice features.
The only thing that is a bit slow is the 90 degrees rotation
and the stamping is missing some drop shadow...

If you still want to have a fast drop shadow program, so
your stamped text is better visuable versus the background,
you can additionally use the program
Faststone Image viewer:

http://www.faststone.org/
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

which is also a very nice picture viewer and editor
program which has a nice and fast drop shadow supported
text overlay stamp function.

With these 2 programs it is a snap
to make 500 pictures with nice text overlay
for grandma´s birthday to show her your last holiday trip pictures.

As most of these digital picture frames begin to display
the picture slideshow after the power is supplied, these are very
"Newbie conform", so Grandma will have no problems to use it.
Just plug it in and the pics will fly..

Also they don´t use much power ( about 5 Watts only) and
you can run them 24/7 on your desk.

Enjoy ! Hope this helps.

Regards, Stefan.

[Pirate88179]

Thanks Stefan.  I am always looking for stuff like this.

Bill