PictureTray

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is PictureTray useful?
I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera, and mail many of them to friends and relatives. I use the highest-res mode of my camera so I have the best quality for printing, but the pictures are way too big to send in email or put on a web page. Most people would much rather have a half or quarter-size version, so it fits on screen and requires less than an hour to download. PictureTray makes it very easy to resize pictures for emailing or posting on a web page.

Credit goes to my wife for the initial idea of an easier-to-use resizer for emailing pictures.

Does PictureTray cost anything?
No. PictureTray is completely free, and may be used however you want, as long as you don't try to sell it. I've used many freeware tools over the years, and have always been grateful to the people who wrote them and gave them away. In fact, PictureTray itself uses a lot of freeware code. I hope other people will find PictureTray useful, and I'd love to get feedback from people who use it. I'll try to incorporate feedback from users to improve it.

How do I use PictureTray?
Here's the really short tutorial. First download PictureTray and unzip it, if necessary. Then: 

• Run PictureTray. 

• Choose the resizing settings. 

• Drop pictures into the In tray, or click on the "Add Files" button and choose some pictures. 

• After the picture processing is finished, select the pictures in the Out tray and drag them into your email or web application.

• Exit PictureTray

See the online manual for more detailed instructions.

Why choose PictureTray over another tool?
Most picture tools require quite a few steps to load a picture, resize it, and then choose a name for the resized picture, save it somewhere, and delete it after you send the email. And you have to do all those steps individually for each picture! PictureTray is much simpler to use, and can process any number of images in a single step. And since it removes the resized pictures automatically when you exit, you don't have to do any of the tedious file management.

What file formats does PictureTray support?
PictureTray can read the following formats:

• Standard Windows bitmap (*.bmp, *.rle, *.dib)
• Graphics Interchange Format (*.gif)
• JPEG (*.jpg, *.jpeg)
• Tag Image File Format (*.tif; *.tiff)
• SGI (*.bw, *.rgb, *.rgba, *.sgi)
• Autodesk (*.cel; *.pic)
• Truevision(*.tga; *.vst; *.icb; *.vda; *.win)
• ZSoft Paintbrush (*.pcx, *.pcc)
• Word 5.x screen capture (*.scr)
• Kodak Photo-CD (*.pcd)
• Portable pixel/gray map (*.ppm, *.pgm, *.pbm)
• Dr. Halo (*.cut, *.pal)
• SGI Wavefront (*.rla, *.rpf)
• Photoshop (*.psd, *.pdd)

Not all of these have been tested, as I don't have sample files for all of them. If you come across files of these types that you can't read, let me know and send me a copy, and I'll see what I can do.

PictureTray can write the following formats:

• Standard Windows bitmap (*.bmp, *.rle, *.dib)
• Graphics Interchange Format (*.gif)
• JPEG (*.jpg, *.jpeg)

What tools did you use to create PictureTray?
PictureTray is written in Delphi 5, my favorite programming environment, and is a single small standalone executable, requiring no other DLLs, COM objects, or installation. To uninstall it, just delete it.

I used components and examples from the following sources:

• Anders Melander's Drag and Drop Components and resampling example code.

• Lloyd's Delphi Help File, for answers to lots of common Delphi questions.

• Earl F. Glynn, for rotate code and lots of good info.

• Mike Lischke's excellent GraphicsEx unit, which does most of the work in reading the various graphics file formats.

• Extra thanks to Torry's Delphi Pages, which let me easily find a lot of the components I needed.

Many thanks to them for the code, components, and info that made it easy to write PictureTray.

Updated: March 05, 2008