Jpegcrop 2010.01

The Microsoft developed Windows operating system comes with a bunch of built-in features. To let you surf the web it features the Internet Explorer browser; to let you listen to music and view videos, it comes with Windows Media Player; and to let you watch images it comes with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (XP) or Windows Photo Gallery (Vista) or Windows Photo Viewer (Windows 7).

The built-in image viewer is pretty basic – it only allows you to view an image, so it doesn’t get any more basic than that. So what do you do if you would like to edit a picture for example? Windows provides a basic tool for your editing needs as well – Paint. As many users can attest, using this tool to edit your pictures is a bit cumbersome.

If you could find a piece of software that would let seamlessly you edit images, and wouldn’t cost you a thing, wouldn’t you like to use it? If that is the case, the congratulations – you’ve just found Jpegcrop. Created by Guido Vollbeding, the Jpegcrop application lets you perform these photo editing tasks:
- Crop your images – just like the software’s name suggests
- Rotate images – turn your image upside down if you like
- Flip images
- Transpose
- Much more

I would like to focus on the option to crop images for example. Whenever you crop a JPEG image, the image is recompressed when you save it. With other photo editing applications, the image slightly degrades – no matter how high the quality setting is. Jpegcrop doesn’t allow images to degrade; it limits the crop to fixed aspect ratios and maintains the existing compression. Since there’s no need to recompress, the image does not degrade.

If you’re looking for a free to use software application that can provide basic photo editing functions and crop images without degrading them, then you’ll find a match in Jpegcrop.

Pros

• Can be used free of charge
• Crop
• Flip, rotate, transpose and other editing functions
• Easy to use
• Doesn't have to be installed

Cons

• None that I could think of

Jpegcrop has been reviewed by George Norman on 26 Feb 2010. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated Jpegcrop 4 out of 5 stars, naming it Excellent