Someone reviewed v on Jul 5, 2022

Pros: 555

Cons: 555

Bottom Line: 555

spiked reviewed v1.6.1.0 Beta on Apr 2, 2006

phrentec is correct when it comes to cropping, rotation, flipping, and EXIF-related functions. There are many free apps which can perform these tasks losslessly.

However, BetterJPEG also supports editing, and it ensures that only the edited region is recompressed upon save. I haven't seen such capability in any other app outside of specialized medical imaging systems. On the other hand, there really isn't a huge audience for this capability outside of such niches.

Long ago, marketing people at Canon, Kodak, etc. figured out that the vast majority of typical users (home/personal) like to know that they "could" edit their photos if they wanted to, but they rarely actually do so. That's why there are so many photo printers which print directly from digital cameras and/or memory cards. Out of the rare times that such users do edit, they seldom edit a photo multiple times, and if they are concerned about quality, merely setting the JPEG option in their editing software to 100% quality will minimize single-generation degradation enough to be tolerable for non-professional use. Often, these users will want to apply global changes to exposure (brightness, contrast, gamma, etc.) or noise reduction. Those kinds of edits render BetterJPEG useless. The professional audience never uses JPEG as a source format, and thus never needs to edit it.

For the few people who would find this product useful, be aware that the built-in editing capability is limited to red eye reduction. For other retouching, BetterJPEG works with your external editor of choice. Basically, it compares pre-edit and post-edit bitmaps to identify the region(s) changed. It then writes your finished JPEG by copying unchanged regions as-is, recompressing only the changes. If you happen to use Photoshop, you can get better integration for this process via BetterJPEG's Photoshop plug-in, a separate product (see their site).

uberfly reviewed v1.6.1.0 Beta on Apr 2, 2006

This is a nice app that does well what the author has set out to do. And yes, jpegcrop.exe is free but total crap. Sometimes $23 dollars is worth a much improved workspace and toolset.

PJE reviewed v1.5.0.0 Beta on Jan 3, 2006

New beta is getting better all the time.

One thing I'd like to see is a toggle button on the crop toolbar to allow/disallow crops outside the image. It's a pain having to go back and forth in the preferences.

Banquo reviewed v1.4.2.0 Beta on Jul 25, 2005

Nice program for what it's meant to do. On a side note however I wish the horrible jpeg format would just die already.

PCLizard reviewed v1.3.9.2 Beta on Mar 22, 2005

I use it to cut JPEGs into pieces when designing site layouts. This way I can cut a single image into several pieces without losing quality. Nice for creating non-rectangular image areas on web sites out of JPEGs.

oayz reviewed v1.3.9.0 Beta on Mar 7, 2005

"Hmm, wouldn't recompression still have to be done for the area where reduction was performed?"

Not necessarily, if you can make the changes directly on the dct coeffs.

Don't confuse people. Color change affects DCT for all 3 channels. Recompression for 8x8 block is required.

PJE reviewed v1.3.9.0 Beta on Mar 7, 2005

BetterJPEG is good at what it does. I use it as the initial program I use having taken the pictures off my camera. I crop to 4x6 and use read eye reduction before saving copies to the same folder as the originals.

I only fire up PSP9 if they need to be messed around with prior to sending to Shutterfly for printing, due to the JPEG degradation.

Saving all modified pictures in a lossless format is not on if you have an overactive 2 year old, and an even more overactive - and shutter happy - wife ;)

A features I like to see would be the 'Save As' name having _crop added rather than _copy if a crop has been performed, and _re if only red-eye had been performed, and even automatically making the save a 'Save As' if the image had been modified - I never want to modify the content of the original.

Overall, well worth the money.

allsiante reviewed v1.3.9.0 Beta on Mar 7, 2005

"Hmm, wouldn't recompression still have to be done for the area where reduction was performed?"

Not necessarily, if you can make the changes directly on the dct coeffs.

mmebane reviewed v1.3.7.0 Beta on Feb 13, 2005

@cees2000:

This program does things that IrfanView doesn't. I use both.

OCedHrt reviewed v1.3.3.0 Beta on Nov 12, 2004

Lossless/no recompression even for red-eye reduction? Hmm, wouldn't recompression still have to be done for the area where reduction was performed?

BlackAle reviewed v1.3.0.0 Beta on Sep 15, 2004

Excellent program, small, fast, efficient. Good to see frequent updates.

blackcherry: your comment on price per kilobyte is nonsensical, according to your logic a big bloated program is better value.

blackcherry reviewed v1.3.0.0 Beta on Sep 14, 2004

a satisfactory program - would be a lot better if it was free. i mean, 5c per kilobyte is substantially high.....

ghammer reviewed v1.2.0.1 Beta on Sep 7, 2004

Dear PC Rat,

What do your comments have to do with this app's performance?

You like having Gbs of TIFFs on your system? Cool. But others like editing the images as they come from their camera with no degradation.

If an image app doesn't have lossless JPG handling, why bother with it?