By Aaron Lee
Bits&Coffee’ BatchPhoto is a handy, all-in-one photo manipulation program for Mac and PC that lets photographers, web designers, business people, and families enhance photos. To use it, you select a group of photographs, and, with a single operation edit, resize, convert, watermark, and rename every image in the group.
Features include a user interface with a Dark-theme, one universal version for both macOS and Windows, drag & drop functionality for the graphical filters, and an Auto Crop filter for automatically cropping photos to a predefined aspect-ratio.
BatchPhoto is useful in a variety of circumstances. For instance, the photography editor at a newspaper with 10 reporters who take photographs in the field can set BatchPhoto to automatically pre-process all of their images. Each reporter can drag and drop their images to a folder on their hard drive.
BatchPhoto will detect the new image, convert it from the reporter’s digital camera format to the format that is needed on the newspaper’s website, change the name of the image from the mysterious name assigned by the digital camera to a meaningful name, add a date and time stamp, reduce the size of the image to the size needed for the site, watermark the image with the newspaper’s copyright notice, and FTP the images to the newspaper’s website. Automatically.
Another example: the office manager of a real estate company can create a BatchPhoto process that automatically grabs and processes each agent’s photos as they move them to a specified folder. The software can adjust the size of each image, add a decorative border to each photo, convert the images to PDF albums so that all of the company’s agents can show the photos to their clients, and upload all of the photographs to the agency’s Facebook and Flickr accounts. Automatically.
BatchPhoto supports more than 170 image formats, and can automatically convert from one format to another. It even handles the RAW format used by many digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras.
BatchPhoto enhances images, one at a time or in batches. The software can automatically detect and fix problems with contrast, brightness, gamma settings, and sharpness. You can us it to transform color images into black and white pictures, charcoal images, or sepia-tone photos. And you can apply solarization and embossing effects to images.
BatchPhoto comes in three editions: Home, Pro, and Enterprise priced at $29.95, $49.95, and $129.95, respectively. A free demo version is available for download.
BatchPhoto Enterprise takes batch photo editing one step further by completely automating the process. All the user needs to do is to create a “hot folder” for the program to monitor. BatchPhoto can monitor several folders at once, either on the computer, network or FTP sites, and apply custom edits for the newly added or modified images in each one of them.
For example, with BatchPhoto Enterprise the user can transfer hundreds of RAW images from a DSLR digital camera to a “hot folder” and have all the images automatically resized, rotated, watermarked with a logo, renamed, converted to TIFF and uploaded to a site via FTP or to Facebook. All of this without the user´s intervention.
Apple World Today Rating (out of 5 stars): ★★★★
