Posted: 25 Nov 2010 04:42 AM PST

Converting, renaming, and resizing pictures one by one is a tedious task. If you're a graphic or web designer, or just the usual computer user, you should try the Microsoft Office Picture Manager to do these tasks. This software is the successor of Microsoft Photo Editor (bundled in Office XP edition), Microsoft Office Picture Library 2003, and Microsoft Office Picture Library.

This application is easy to use. It can convert your stock photos to JPEG, PNG, TIF, GIF, and BMP file formats in no time. The JPEG option lets you customize all the pictures' compression settings. This way, you can limit the file size to your own preference.

With this software, you can also rename images all at once with automatic numbering sequences — you can specify the number of digits, start of the number, and display option (either at the beginning or end of the file name).

If you want more control over the photos' sizes, you can utilize the program's resize settings. You can modify all the images' width and height by pixel and percentage. This tool has six predefined width x height settings. If you're pictures are to be posted online, you can select the web properties. If it's for documents, you can choose the document settings.

If you don't know where to find Microsoft Office Picture Manager, you can just type its keywords on Vista and Windows 7's search boxes.

You can also find this program by browsing All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tool.

When Microsoft Office Picture Manager is open, click the File menu.

Next, press Add Picture Shortcut.

Browse through your computer and select the folder where you'll save your converted, renamed, and / or resized photos. Hit the Add button to proceed to the next step.

In the application's main interface, you'll see an empty box. Drag and drop the images you want to convert, rename, and / or resize to this box.

Select all the dropped pictures.

Click the Export pictures link on the side panel.

The Export side panel has four commands you can utilize.

In Export with this file name section, you can rename all the photos at once with several customizable settings. Click Rename to continue.

Under Rename, enter your preferred file name. This will be applied to all pictures. Tick Replace existing file name.

To differentiate each file, you'll have to enable the adding of the sequential numbers. f you want to preview the filenames, you can see it under Preview.

Press Return to Export.

To convert your photos to other file types, you can do it here.

To get more resize properties, press the Resize link.

You can pick one predefined size under Resize settings.

You can also modify the default size according to your own choice of width and height. For this illustration, we will resize all the photos 70% from their original dimensions.

When all settings are final, click the OK button. The converting, renaming, and resizing of all the pictures will just take seconds to complete.

These are the original photos with their file names and sizes.

These are the result images. The filenames are easier to read and manage, and the sizes are smaller.

Copyright © 2007
Online Tech Tips.
Aseem Kishore (digitalfingerprint: a59a56dce36427d83e23b501579944fcakmk1980 (74.125.94.87) )

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Bulk Convert, Rename, and Resize Images with MS Office Picture Manager

Try 4 Unique Search Engines

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 03:12 AM PST

Regardless if you are on team Bing or team Google, using the same search engine day in and day out grows monotonous over time. But, these days lesser search engines—the ones that know they will never match the big boys—are taking unique approaches to delivering results. Here are a few to break the search engine doldrums:

1. Inframutt

Inframutt looks like Google for good reason—it uses Google's search results, but with a twist. Inframutt's philosophy is to promote democracy by offering the underprivileged, the downtrodden, the powerless, and the obscure a chance to thrive.

Instead of displaying the best matches for your keyword search using the complex Google algorithm, Inframutt shows the least popular matches first. In other words, it inverts Google's search results, showing obscure Web sites no one would ever see otherwise.

2. Quintura

If mindmaps are more your cup of tea, Quintura is a good choice. Instead of just listing results that match a keyword search, Quintura displays other related keywords clustered together in various sizes. Hover your mouse over any of the generated keywords to see the top three Web sites using that keyword in relationship to the original topic.

3. Cranky

Cranky is search engine designed for Web surfers over the age of 50. Search results are listed according to a ranking system where editors (who are over 50) and surfers (who are also over 50) rank whether or not a site is relevant to their needs.

So, if searching for Paris, results should show information about traveling to the city rather than Paris Hilton's daily shenanigans, at least according to Cranky's CEO video on the homepage.

4. Searchbots

For the graphically oriented and creative, Searchbots.net is a fun search engine. Users create a robot to search the Web on their behalf. Users choose everything about the robot, from its color to its personality.

Once registered, users can have the bot search the Web by Web site tags, colors, feeds or simply through asking a question. Results are displayed with graphical thumbnails of each Web site.

Copyright © 2007
Online Tech Tips.
Aseem Kishore (digitalfingerprint: a59a56dce36427d83e23b501579944fcakmk1980 (74.125.94.87) )

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Try 4 Unique Search Engines

How to Delete a Group in Facebook

Posted: 24 Nov 2010 04:56 AM PST

I’ve been playing around a lot lately with Facebook Groups and even created one for our whole family so that they can enjoy the baby! I also created some dummy Facebook groups just to see the kind of stuff you can do with it and I ran across an interesting problem once I had finished my testing: I could not delete the group!

Yeah, apparently once you create a group in Facebook, there is no simple “Delete Group” button! No, in order to delete a Facebook group, you have to jump through all kinds of hurdles. Eventually I figured it out, but what a pain. Here’s how to delete a group in Facebook in case you need to do the same:

Step 1: First, go to your group and click on See All next to the Members section.

delete facebook group

Step 2: When you see the list of members, click on See All again! Not sure why you have to do this twice, but it’s the only want to get to the screen where you can actually remove members.

facebook delete group

Step 3: Now a kind of pop-up window will appear and here you can actually remove people from the group. In order to delete a group, you have to remove all the members of the group and then remove yourself last, which I will explain later.

Step 4: Go ahead and click the X next to each persons name in order to remove them. Note that if other people are Admins of the group, you cannot delete them. In order to delete the group with multiple admins, each admin must leave the group individually. So first you would have to remove all the members, then ask each admin to leave the group and then leave the group yourself.

Step 5: Once all the members have been removed and assuming you are the admin, you then have to leave the group yourself. Do this by going to the main group page and clicking on Leave group.

leave facebook group

And that’s it!!! Yeah, talk about an annoying procedure to delete a group! Now at this point the group should totally be gone, but we’re not really certain in Facebook decides to remove everything that was posted in the group or if they store it on their servers somewhere!

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How to Delete a Group in Facebook