When I talked about the best programs to edit photos and images I had tried to catch the best for each lens. There are those to browse and manage photos, to edit them like a professional, to apply simple automatic filters, to change size, colors, contrast, brightness and to add frames, borders or other things.
In this case we see a new ideal program to apply automatic effects and modifications to groups of photos and images which, perhaps, is the best of its kind, both for the amount of modifications obtainable and for the ease of use.
I therefore believe that XnConvert is one of those programs that must never be missing on a computer, 32 bt or 64 bit, be it Windows, Linux or Mac (for Windows also in a portable version).
Recently XnConvert has been updated and has really become a great tool, especially suitable when you need to make changes to groups of photos and images on your computer .
The program interface is divided into three main tabs .
In the first it is possible to add single files or entire folders to be processed.
Image files can be sorted in various ways and you can selectively delete images from the selection so that they are not modified by the program.
XnConvert supports all image file formats used on Windows, Linux, Mac and the internet (JPG, PNG or Adobe PSD, RAW etc.).
In the second tab, Actions, you access the editing filters and then specify how the chosen images are to be processed.
Where processing is written there is a button that opens the menu of automatic effects to be applied to photos.
A weakness of the program is that the transformation options are not explained.
Some are self-explanatory, others not at all, especially because they are in English and because we are not experts in photo editing.
For each effect you can see the immediate preview so it becomes easy to try them in case you have no idea what they mean with a "Before" and "After".
An option to display next to each other would have been very useful.
The icons with the left and right arrows scroll through all the images that have been added to the input tab, to preview the changes.
Precisely, just to list the most important, you can see several effects :
Image : add a frame, automatic cropping, file resizing, color depth, metadata cleaning, mirror, replace color, rotation, DPI setting, text, vignetting, watermark.
Map : align Histogram, automatic contrast, color levels, color balance, equalizer, Levels, normalization, posterization, Sepia, Shadow, Solarization.
Filters : Blur, relief, Borders, focus, blur control, noise reduction.
Miscellaneous : Add noise, 3D 3D borders, Mosaic, Oil painting, old camera.
These effects can be added in sequence on the images and are applied from the first to the top, going in descending order.
On the left is the list of effects selected with a button to remove them.
A user who wants to resize images can choose select Immage> Resize .
A configuration menu also appears for each effect.
Finally, the output card defines where the edited photo files should be saved so as to create a copy without touching the originals.
You can select a folder, give a common name to all the images and decide the format.
At the end, you can click on the Convert button at the bottom right and apply all the effects automatically to the group of photos chosen .
Personally, as an all-in-one program to browse photos on the computer and apply basic effects such as cropping, resizing and photographic filters I have always used IrfanView.
XnConvert is however excellent if you want to make changes to groups of similar photos or of which you want to create a resized or retouched copy.
Download XnConvert
Other programs to resize images together, add borders and effects to photos and other changes, similar and alternative to this, are listed in another post.
