batch

If you use or have used Batch on your iPhone, you likely received an e-mail yesterday announcing the app's demise. As of yesterday, the app is no longer available. And after Thursday, November 8, all of your photos on Batch will be deleted. The e-mail outlines the three-step process needed to rescue your photos. In case you missed the e-mail from Batch yesterday, here's how you get your Batch photos before they're gone.

1. Visit the Batch Web site from your computer.

2. Log in using your Facebook account.

3. Click the Download Photos link.

That's … Read more

We've tried tons of freeware MP3 converters. They tend to fall somewhere in between Easy Enough for Beginners and Feature-Filled for Experts. DVDVideoSoft's Free Audio Converter definitely registers on the "Easy" end of the dial, but it offers enough options to enable you to encode your MP3s in several different formats, including three levels of LAME. A Preset Wizard makes it easy to save your settings for future use. It can access compatible audio files on your hard drive or stored on a CD, but it doesn't rip CD audio.

Free Audio Converter shares a … Read more

Watermarks are a great way to ensure that your images aren't appropriated by some jerk on the Internet who wants to claim your brilliant work as his or her own. Mytoolsoft Watermark Software is an easy-to-use program that can not only apply custom watermarks but also perform other basic editing tasks, such as resizing and converting images to other formats. We think it's a great choice if you're looking for a simple way to affix your mark permanently to your images.

The program has a sleek and intuitive wizard-style interface. Users first select the images they want … Read more

Scarabee Software's Siren is easy-to-use but powerful file-renaming freeware. It quickly renames, moves, or copies selected files using expressions you create. Suppose you want to rename all the images in a folder sequentially. Instead of manually renaming each in sequence, Siren can do the whole batch at once. It displays image previews and tags to help you be sure you've got the right files.

Siren is portable freeware that runs as soon as you click the program file without having to be installed or registered in Windows. When we first opened the program, a "first contact" … Read more

If you have a digital camera, it doesn't take long to fill your PC with lots and lots of high-quality images, some of them huge in size. Fortunately there's no shortage of free photo-resizing software, ranging from small and speedy tools that emphasize automatic operation and batch conversion to full-fledged graphics tools rivaling some pricey packages. EasyNote's PhotoTrim definitely hews to the simple-is-better philosophy, offering basic settings and speedy batch conversion as well as some compression. Unfortunately, it's not exactly free: you have to register to unlock "advanced" features such as cropping. Add in … Read more

True to its name, this popular and affordable app's main functionality is converting graphic files--importing from some 200 formats and exporting to about 80 at last count, with a tremendously time-saving batch processor thrown in for good measure. But GraphicConverter also proves invaluable as a high-speed image editor that lets you quickly browse, resize, sharpen, adjust color, and optimize for the Web, all at a price that makes commercial packages blush.

GraphicConverter's interface hasn't quite kept up with its ever-growing feature set (and many of its most useful features can be accessed outside of the app anyway, … Read more

Certain image formats are better suited to particular tasks than others, so if you do a lot of work with digital images it makes sense to have a program that can easily convert between a variety of formats. AVD Batch Converter is definitely not the fanciest file converter we've encountered, but if you need a no-frills way to convert batches of images from one format to another, it can get the job done.

The program's interface is intuitive, if not particularly attractive. Three panes let users navigate to specific directories, view a selected directory's contents, and preview … Read more

BatchPurifier Lite removes metadata from JPEG images without affecting their quality. Such data can include thumbnails, geotags, Photoshop resources, EXIF data, and even the make and model of the camera that captured the image. Removing some or all of the metadata from your images helps reduce their size on the disk, but it can also help protect your privacy, especially if you like to share pictures online. BatchPurifier Lite can also remove metadata from compressed images. This freeware version of a premium tool is fully functional but limited to JPEG images only.

BatchPurifier Lite's wizard-based interface starts with the … Read more

Batch file renamers have been around for a long time, but MP3s and digital cameras have made them very popular indeed. Aaron Stewart Batch File Rename is a free file renamer with which you can create, combine, and save as many rules as you need to rename large batches of files automatically. It can handle extremely long file names, up to 32,000 characters, as well as MP3 and EXIF tags.

Aaron Stewart Batch File Rename's user interface is busy but well-designed, with a central file list above the rules configuration sections. The program opens with the New Rules … Read more