Almost 10 years ago, we handed over a beautifully themed Wordpress website to a client. After a while, we found out the website started to look like a disaster because all the images uploaded by the client were distorted. The person in charge of uploading photos didn't have the right software to crop the images.
Spending thousands of dollars to buy a copy of Photoshop to resize images in bulk was not a wise choice. However, we couldn't find any decent software to crop and resize the images in batch properly. They either produced pixelated images or distorted the image into the dimension without cropping. To this date, I still wonder why anyone needs a squashed image to fit into a desired dimension.
Even you have Photoshop, it is not so bad to record one batch action to resize the images. However, if you want to change a different dimension, you need to record a different batch action. Eventually, you will end up with have many batch actions in your Photoshop. You'll have the same problem if you use Automator in Mac.
Another problem is that all these software options needed to be installed and some companies' security policies are very strict and installing a software would need layers of management approval.
I wanted to solve this problem. In the beginning, I tried to create an app which did not require installation. However, I soon hit a major problem of supporting multiple operating systems. All the versions of Windows and Mac required different executable files and I didn't have the time nor means to test it on all systems.
Until one day the idea of making a website to solve this problem came to my mind. For sure a website wouldn't be as powerful as a software, but it could do a decent job.
The first version of BIRME was first built in 2012 with HTML, Javascript and a little bit of help from Flash (do you still remember there was Flash?). In 2015, BIRME removed the Flash component which was used to generate a zip file and prompt the browser for download.
The design of BIRME 2.0 was done in 2016. Slowly the code has been refreshed and it is now finally close to what we once envisioned.
- Special thanks to Tony Sarg for helping on the write up -