Blogstomp Review: Just about the best timesaver I’ve come across in AGES

Have you discovered Blogstomp yet? If you’re a blogger and you blog photographs then you need this, like, yesterday. It’s AMAZING.

Before we go any further, I’m not an affiliate, I’m not trying to make any money out of you. I have been using the app for a couple of weeks now and it has completely revolutionised how I blog images. And I am evangelical about it. That’s it! So this is not about generating any affiliate revenue, I just want to save you time.

Time saving and pixel perfect

One of the things that stops many of us blogging is a lack of time. For some of us, it’s also that quest for perfection. All these things get in the way of you showcasing your lovely work with the world.

I have been told off on numerous occasions by Matt Pereira complaining that my photo montages aren’t pixel perfect. Now I don’t know about you but I have better things to do with my time than nudge things a mm to the left or right. Yes, I absolutely expect it of my designers when they’re creating client work. But my blog is my notebook and if everything was pixel perfect I honestly wouldn’t have time to get done half the stuff I get done (but that’s another story for another day…).

Matt Pereira and Eddie Judd both encouraged me to try Blogstomp, and I’m so glad they did. Even though it just looked like another pain in the backside tool in my workflow, it has saved me AGES when it comes to creating web ready images for the blog. And they come out pixel perfect! Result.

How I use it

I still do all my photo selection and organisation in Lightroom. And I edit my photos in Photoshop. But then I just import my full sized images into blogstomp and let it do it’s thing.

I don’t love that layout, and the difference in background tones looks appalling there doesn’t it? It’s really quick to chop and change images when you see that they’re not working.

I tend to select a few images I think will work together and see what kind of layout it comes up with.

If I don’t like the layout, I click Mix It Up until it comes up with something I do like. Then I click Stomp It and it’ll save the images at the right size and resolution for my blog. How clever?

You need to set up the detail for your blog- specify how wide you want your images to be and also define your styles – I have a 1px black border and a 10px (that’s pixels by the way) white border style. You can also add a watermark but so far I haven’t felt the need or found the time to work out how to do that.

The upsides

If you don’t already use Blogstomp, here are a few of the features I’ve found really helpful and I hope you find it saves you time too…

• Playing about with photos that you think might go together without using shed-loads of memory in Photoshop
• Resizing and reorganising at a flick of a button. I dread to think how many hours I’ve wasted doing this manually in Photoshop
• Pixel perfect borders with no effort
• Consistency of styling – every image that comes out is exactly the same style (if I choose it to be). That would be really hard to do manually
• Saving at the right size for my blog without even trying (to be fair, I used to use Photoshop Actions for this so it was pretty quick, but it was still a 2 step process – resize using the action and then Save For Web – blogstomp does this in one Stomp It click)
• As it Stomps them it removes them from your list so you don’t accidentally use the same image twice (tell me it’s not just me that’s done that?)
• If you realise that a couple of the images don’t work together you just de and reselect different ones

Does this sound more and more like an advert? Sorry Told you I was evangelical.

The downsides?

• It can only montage up to 4 images at a time. So if you want to put together uber-montages like Matt did in his recent post on my charity fundraiser then you’ll need to use something else.
• There’s no free (useful) trial – they get watermarked, so you kind of have to just go for it
• It doesn’t seem to like .png files (the files I get when I take a screenshot like the images above) which means I still need to resize those in Photoshop

Are you a Blogstomp convert too? I’d love to know how you use it and if I’m missing any tricks.

Tagged as , Blogstomp Review in Blogging