A year or so ago I wrote a little application unimaginatively named John’s Background Switcher. All it does is change the background (or desktop) of your computer at specified intervals and you tell it what pictures you want to use. It sits down by the clock in the taskbar so you can say ‘change now’ and ‘pause’ and such like. It amazed me that something like that wasn’t already a part of windows and has continued to amaze me by how many people download it. Whenever I get a nice comment thanking me for it I can honestly say it makes my day!

Anyway, I was resizing a photo the other day to put on this site and I fired up my main PC because I needed to use Photoshop to do it and I didn’t have that installed on my server that I was browsing the net with. I could use Flickr but the problem is it doesn’t compress the smaller images so a 450×375 image would be around 180KB when Photoshop would make it around 35KB (hey, bandwidth matters to me!). Then I thought “someone must have written a simple utility to resize images so I don’t have to fire up Photoshop every time” and was surprised to find nothing that really impressed me (everything seemed to have bells and whistles whereas all I wanted was to be able to resize a single image). I decided to write my own…

It’s called John’s Image Converter and it does exactly what it says. It’s Windows-only and all the instructions are on the page I’ve just linked to (as is a section for reporting bugs and suggestions). It’s completely free and I hope it’s of use to somebody!