ImageWell, the free and lean image editor…
Originally downloaded 3/16/06. ImageWell will never replace PhotoShop, but when you have a simple task to prepare an image for your website, this can be pretty handy! ImageWell does basic resizings, sets background color, adds a drop shadow or border, and so forth. It’s very compact, and the editing features appear when you press a tiny “Edit” button. The first thing you do is set information for your website… the destination data can be for either an FTP location, webdav (.Mac for example), or a local folder. The software invites a very tight workflow to get things done quickly.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a couple of things that I’ll need:
- No quality adjustments for PNG or GIF files like it does for JPEG. Also no distinguishing between PNG-24 and PNG-8… I think it defaults to the much larger PNG-24 format.
- No batch operations are possible. You can neither automate the workflows nor schedule ImageWell to handle a whole folder full of images.
For simple tasks involving JPEG files, this freeware is a dream and a marvel of Mac ingenuity. For me, though, it doesn’t do anything I can’t do just as easily with Photoshop, a folder action, and Transmit. For that matter, I could probably write an Automator workflow to integrate the work even further!
Update 11/2/06. Version 3.0 of ImageWell was recently released, and besides adding some new and enhanced features, ImageWell now has a shareware version with still more bells and whistles. I’ve downloaded it to give the new version a try.
Version as tested: 2.1.1.
