I recently did a large video project for a client and had to do everything from converting DVD’s to web video, converting web video to DVD’s to creating audio files from video and more. I tried a number of software products and usually had to use a myriad of them to get the job done. It was tedious, time consuming and the quality wasn’t always that great. The biggest problem I was having was converting video to the right format for the web with optimal quality.

During my search for a better way I stumbled across AVS4YOU. At first I was torn because the product wasn’t free and I was working on a very tight budget. But after a number of other failures I decided to give it a try and I can tell you this software changed my multimedia life!

AVS4YOU is actually a suite of tools for audio, video, images and a few other miscellaneous things. You pay one price and get access to the entire suite. They offer an unlimited license or a 1 year license and a 30-day money back guarantee.

Note: They are running a 70% off special through March (sorry I didn’t catch that sooner in the month).

I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve fallen in love with this software but here are 7 of the reasons why:

1. The set of tools is comprehensive, from editing audio to video conversion, authoring and more.. it’s in there
2. It has saved me more time than I can calculate
3. It is very affordable
4. I’ve found it to be very intuitive and easy to use
5. Good quality and good support
6. You can download the tools and add them on as you need them, you don’t have to download things you don’t use (no bloat on your computer).
7. Just one of these tools is worth the asking price IMO much less all of them
   

While there are many tools out there, some even free, I’ve not found anything as comprehensive, easy to use and reasonably priced as this.

In my case I use the video converter more than anything (I already have Sony Vegas for editing) but I also use the audio tools, DVD authoring, Video Recording, Ring tone creation…

AVS4YOU is great whether you are a total novice just trying to get some video on your site or are more experienced and looking to simplify your workflow.

If you are doing anything at all with multimedia files for the web (or otherwise) AVS4YOU will save you time and frustration.

Common mistakes include:

• Leaving the image too large which breaks the layout
• Dynamically adjusting the image size using CSS or HTML

It’s much better size your images appropriately but when you have a lot of images it can be a real pain. There are many tools out there which allow you to batch re-size images but I’m going to focus on two common and solid tools to help. In both cases we’re looking at services which also allow you to host your images on their site and share them with the web. Best of all the tools are free!

1. Flickr:

For all around photo sharing and great Search Engine Optimization (more on this later) Flickr is a great way to go. They offer the Flickr Desktop Uploader (Windows and Mac) which will allow you to upload photos to your account and automatically re-size them for upload through the tool. They have several re-size options including:

• 800 pixels (good for on screen display)
• 1280 pixels, suitable for small prints and the minimum for use as desktop wallpaper
• 1600 pixels, suitable for larger prints and more ideal for desktop wallpaper
• 2048 pixels, good for still larger prints and archiving.

Auto resizing in the Flickr desktop uploader is as easy as going to the top menu and selecting Tools > Preferences and look under Automatic Resizing. The default will be not to re-size at all.

Unfortunately you sometimes need sizes other than these for your site. In the my photo gallery on vsellis.com, my display width is set to a max size of 600 to fit in my main content area so the default Flickr sizes won’t quite work and I need to find a different option.

Note: If you look at your photostream on Flickr.com you’ll find that it will create two sizes of thumbnails for you as well.

The normal Photostream thumbnail is 240px wide or 240px tall (which may be a useful small images size on your website), and the navigation thumbnail is a cropped square at 75px x 75px (which is a good icon size for use on your site though a tiny bit big for my preference, I usually use small thumbnails which are 70px x 70px or extra-small at 55px x 55px).

2. Picasa

Picasa (download) is another great tool from Google. Free to download and they’ll host your pictures as well. The service isn’t generally as popular as Google but their desktop client is great for making managing your photos easy. You can easily upload to your Picasa Web Gallery (all you need is your Google email or id) and edit your photos including batch editing. One of the things I like better about Picasa is that when batch resizing you can choose the maximum width or height that you want to resize to rather than using the handful of defaults provided by Flickr, which is useful when you need to get to a specific size to use images on your own website.
To batch re-size in Picasa simply open Picasa and do the following:

1. Select the folder you want to re-size.
2. Select the images you want by ctrl+clicking on them or if you want them all use crtl+A (select all).
3. Go to File > Export Picture to Folder
4. Select the “Re-size to” radio button and enter the maximum size (it will constrain to a maximum width or height)
5. For image quality I usually use “Normal” it provides good image quality while making the image file size reasonable for web downloading.
6. Click Ok and Picasa will do it’s thing.

Note: You might want to check your pictures and make sure they all still look sharp and crisp (no pixelation) near the edges of object. If the quality seems to suffer a bit, go with the default quality instead of “Normal.”

Picasa will create album thumbnails which are constrained to a maximum size of 128px (again, tall or wide).
Not only do Flickr and Picasa make it easy to re-size and batch edit images you can then link to the images on their service if you want when embedding the image on your website (as long as the size is right), which means that bandwidth intensive images use their bandwidth not yours!
My personal approach is to use my online Picasa Gallery as an archive and place to store a lot of images while I put my best stuff on Flickr.

Now you have two good ways to easily re-size images that you can send through email and use on your own website completely free.

These are two common tools but there are several other online tools available as well. Here is a quick list of others you can check out:

• Smush.It (you can also get a Smush.It plugin for WordPress that will automate this for you when you upload images to your WordPress blog (self hosted WordPress, not sure about WordPress.com)
• Punypng
• Easy Image Resizer
• Web Resizer
• iResize
• Pic Resize
• Shrink Pictures
• DynamicDrive Image Optimizer (also has a great tool for creating a favicon)
• Resize Image
• Easy Cropper
• ImageOptimizer.net
• Resizr
• Picnik (full blown editor, not Photoshop by any means but free to use web service that covers the basics well).

You can see a quick review of most of these at hardgeek.org.

Was there anything I didn’t cover here that you would like to know about batch resizing images or using Flickr or Picasa? Let me know…

Sidebar, If you like to take your own images but aren’t exactly a great photographer take a look at the new book on camera basics to help you get to know your way around your camera a little better. Knowing your camera will make all the difference in getting better pictures straight out of the camera.