Add effects and manage photos on your Mac

You have a few thousand photos on your Mac but you want to do a few things that are not easy in iPhoto. Not easy? Try cropping a bunch of photos. Try resizing a bunch of photos. Try adding attractive frames to your photos. What you need is something easy. Easy? Yes, EasyFrame, EasyCrop, EasyBatch.

Easy Photo Stuff

I’m a sucker for Mac utilities that do those little things that we find out we need but can’t be done by the more popular applications.

I have Photoshop but it’s a bear to handle certain chores, and I’m in constant need of Photoshop for Dummies to do some of the simplest tasks.

Easy Batch Photo

My first example is EasyBatchPhoto which does as the name suggests. It performs a variety of tasks on a bunch of photos at the same time.

Convert, resize, add watermark or copyright. Try that in iPhoto on a few hundred photos.

EasyBatchPhoto frees you from these repetitive tasks by processing hundreds, or even thousands, of images with a single drag-and-drop.

It’ll scale, convert, resize photos. It also preserves JPEG/EXIF headers, and allows on-the-fly renaming of photos. Yes, there’s true lossles JPEG conversions, too, plus support for JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD files (click any image for a pop up close up view).

That’s it. Adjust the settings the way you want, drag a folder full of your photos to EasyBatchPhoto’s drop window, and you’re good to go. Remember to make backup copies of your photos. EasyBatchPhoto will drop the modified images wherever you choose.

Easy Frame

One thing iPhoto doesn’t do well is add those special touches such as fuzzy frames. EasyFrame does. Drag, drop, select frame, add color, save or send as email.

Whether it is for emailing or posting on your blog, adding a border or edge effect can dramatically enhance the appeal of a picture.

Easy Crop

iPhoto does cropping, though not as precise as we may like, certainly not intuitively. EasyCrop makes cropping fun when it’s usually not. There’s too many steps.

Enter the one trick pony for cropping photos (plus a few extra tricks).

Simply drag the photo into EasyCrop. Then select the area you wish to crop and resize using a slider. When you’re happy with what you see in the live preview, enter the file size limit and drag the preview image straight to the email you are composing.

3 or 1?

You may not need but one of the utilities from Yellow Mug software, or two, perhaps all three. What I would like to see is a combined utility with the functions and features of all three but with a tabbed interface, once click to move from one to the other.

I’ve got enough windows open on my Mac’s screen these days so smaller utilities tend to get lost.

Prices range from $11.95 for EasyCrop to $23.95 for EasyBatch, but there’s a bundled price of $49.95 for all three plus five other YellowMug utilities. Overkill? Probably.