iResizer review: Get your images to fit, without cropping

When it comes to Instagram, I usually prefer to post images that I took on my phone. But some people like to use the image-sharing service as a highlight reel for their DSLR images—which is great, but chances are those photos weren’t shot with a square aspect ratio.

You could crop your images, of course, but the $20 iResizer ( Mac App Store link; currently on sale for $2) offers a different option: The app’s content-aware resizing tools fit all of your image—no cropping involved—into a square frame, maintaining the original aspect ratio of the important parts.

iResizer’s tools are fairly simple. You use a marker, lasso, or magnetic lasso to highlight (in green) the parts of the image that you’d like to keep in their original aspect ratio—faces and bodies, for instance. There’s also a red highlighter for the parts of the image you’d like to remove. An eraser tool lets you finesse your highlights. You can, of course, adjust the size of your marker tool, as well as zoom in or out when highlighting.

Once you’ve finished marking up your image, click the Resize button and enter your desired aspect ratio, and the app resizes your image appropriately while leaving the selected content alone. In my tests, iResizer worked pretty well, though I did see some background distortions and occasional glitches, such as, in one example, a misaligned tree branch resulting from the removal of a person from the frame.

Still, iResizer is a nifty utility to have in your photo-editing tool belt, especially if you don’t have the means to pick up Adobe Photoshop—and especially if you grab iResizer at its current sale price of a paltry $2.

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