PhotoWham

Just about everybody has a digital camera or picture-taking cell phone, to judge by the number of photo editors out there. Manatee's PhotoWham stands out from the crowd with a unique angle: You set your resizing, renaming, and watermark preferences once, and then drag and drop single images, folders, or whole batches of files for quick, automatic processing. It can add specific text to the beginning or end of file names and save to specific directories.

This compact tool has one of the simplest interfaces we've ever tested: just a main display and two buttons--one activating a settings dialog, the other a file browser--and a link to a Web-based Help file and FAQs. We opted to start by changing the output directory but otherwise tried the default settings, which append images with -800 and add a basic watermark. PhotoWham converted a folder full of JPEGs in blistering time, and the new images opened in every viewer we tried, except, strangely, Photoshop. The watermark dialog lets you adjust the font properties, color, and style, but though watermarks can be any text, including a copyright symbol, you can't use an image or symbol. One feature we did like is the ability to specify a maximum length for the long edge of each photo, which is great for sizing pictures for galleries or Web sites.

PhotoWham is free for home users. It works in the latest versions of Windows, including Windows 7. It's one of the simplest but most efficient digital photo resizers we've tried.