Adjusting dimensions and compression ratio to a desired file size is easy.

I have long been looking for a good iPad app that can easily compress and resize images for my blogs. Until now, I’ve had to search out the secondary features of image-editing apps, and even then the process seemed less than secondary and more just a side-effect.

And then on my last trip, I found out the app I’d been using no longer even worked on my iPad, and had been pulled from the app store.

Fortunately, I was able to find Photo Resize, Rotate, Flip & Compress by Rowel Atienza. It’s not free, but it is only 99 cents, and it provides a simple interface for changing the dimensions of an image and choosing the compression ratio. You can use sliders to adjust compression and dimensions, and you can enter exact dimensions in the boxes provided.

While adjusting dimensions and compression, it also recalculates the resultant file size and displays it.

Photo Resize saves only as JPEG, which is appropriate since its main purpose is choosing an appropriate JPEG compression ratio.

As the app’s title indicates, it also allows flipping images vertically or horizontally, and rotating them in ninety-degree increments; however, I don’t personally have a use for those features, so I haven’t tested them.

Photo Resize would be perfect if it also handled cropping images, but the built-in Photos app on iOS handles cropping already, so the lack of it isn’t much of a flaw. A more glaring omission is the lack of visual feedback when reducing the compression ratio. The app only shows the compression’s degradation after hitting Done to send the image off to another app. Mind you, if you don’t like the results a quick tap on Back allows you to readjust the settings. And in its defense, the image quality after even high compression is extremely good.

This app is a must have for bloggers and anyone needing to resize images on the fly. I’m still amazed at how many photo apps do not let you resize or compress the images you edit, and that give no feedback on how big—in file size and thus download time—your image is. And some that do, don’t even show what dimensions you’re resizing to. Photo Resize does both, in a simple interface.

It also allows saving, besides back to the photo album, to pretty much any app that supports Open In with photos. This includes Dropbox, Google Drive, Twitter, Facebook, Transmit, Gmail, and Google+, as well as several messaging apps.

The bottom line is, if you need to resize and compress images on the iPad or iPhone, Photo Resize is a very useful app.