Reduce Your Bloated Image The Easy Way. Free.

iPhoto and Mail work well together to take digital photos, reduce the size, and send out as an email message.

What about all the other images that need a little size reduction? ImageWell and QuickScale to the rescue. Did I mention they’re free?

It’s not that the Mac doesn’t have plenty of graphic applications that can modify graphic images or digital photos.

Sometimes you just need to get the job done without a lot of bother, a steep learning curve, or, you know, expense. As in money.

That’s what you get with ImageWell and QuickScale. You’ll especially like the “free” part.

Here’s the situation. You have a bunch of digital photos that need to be scaled; reduced in size or dimensions. It happens.

If you’re into Photoshop or Fireworks or whatever else costs more money than my first born male child, then have at it.

Even automation tools make it a painful process.

QuickScale is the easy one. Except for not always being in English.

Drag a file or folder of files to QuickScale, select a scale or size, select a destination, and click. You’re done.

I tried it on folders with a few hundred photos. Dutch or English. It works. This is a nifty tool that won’t set you back too much gray matter; there’s not that many buttons and options.

ImageWell is a bit different; besides the fact that it’s in English, it’s also in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and a few dialects of Chinese only heard on Firefly.

ImageWell not only lets you edit images; resize, crop, shape, rotate, add watermark, add border or drop shadow, it’ll FTP the images here and there, thither and yon.

Going beyond the mundane, ImageWell also lets you add shapes to your images. Can you say, “Talking Balloons?”

As you’d expect, there’s quality and size adjustments so you can scale an image to fit a project. It even creates links for uploaded images. It’s drag and drop or click and send. You choose.

My only real complaint is the typical Mac application slider bars for adjustments.

For example, with JPG images, the slider bar simply goes from Low to High and points in between.

That’s OK for basic images but isn’t precise.

I’d like to see 72-percent, or 80-percent, or 50-percent accuracy for such things.

No, such precision won’t help me with oncoming mommyhood and soon-to-be child, but I’m hoping for a head start.

This is a nifty Mac application that should not be limited to those into graphics and image manipulation. Even if you can’t spell Photoshop, ImageWell is a good addition because it does so much with such ease.

The latest version of ImageWell is a universal binary so it’ll run great on the new Intel-based Macs. Did I mention that it’s free?