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Mac Freeware: Thumbscrew 1.0

Sometimes you find an application just after you needed it. For my Amazon reflections post, I looked for an easy way to spruce up the small images of the children; a small, photo-like frame perhaps. My searches found nothing.

I soon began my quest anew and discovered Thumbscrew, a small app that’s been in beta for close to three years. The 1.0 version was released last week and, after testing it, I’ve decided it’s worth the wait.

Thumbscrew is a simple application - pull a photo into the drop box and it quickly creates a thumbnail. Were it only a thumbnail generator, it would be worth keeping. Its true attraction is the ease with which it adds polish to an image. For example, using an image from my Amazon post, it transforms this…

…into this…

Neat, huh? It’s instant too. The settings provide a range of options, including degree of skew, background transparency, thumbnail size, etc. It also processes images in batches.

Thumbscrew resizes everything to a specified thumbnail size, which can be adjusted in the preferences. Since I’ll use it primarily to add border & shadow effects to images, an option to retain the image size would be handy. But that’s a minor quibble - I’ll happily use this free, effective app as it is.