Category: Freewares

  • Batch Convert SVG to PNG

    Conversion SVG

    The easiest way to convert a bunch of svg images into png: ConversionSVG + InkScape

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    It’s very straightforward and the quality is much better than various online tools

    • Install first InkScape and next ConversionSVG.
    • Run ConversionSVG,
    • Select the output “Format”  = .PNG,
    • Select the “Exportation Zone” = Dessin
    • Set the desired “Size” for the output images.
    • Select the “Folder” containing the svg images to be converted
    • Select bellow the target folder to store the converted images.
    • Click “Convert

    Et voilà 😉

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  • Create Panorama from pictures and video

    Image Composite Editor
    Image Composite Editor

    The best free tool available to create Panorama is IMO ICE, Image Composite Editor, from the Microsoft Research Lab. Not only it’s able to join pictures, but it’s also auto-completing the gaps !!! It can even create a panorama from a panning video.

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    Basic usage is very simple to create a panorama, with a set of pictures taken in a raw:

    • Press CTRL-N to create a new Panorama
    • Open the folder containing the pictures to be used, press CTRL-A to pick them all and press ENTER to continue
    • There a 4 steps: Import, Stitch, Crop and Export. For simple panorama, go directly to step 3.
    • Click on “Auto Complete” (top-right of the screen) or on “Auto Crop”. The result with “Auto Complete” is amazing.
    • Click on step 4, Export, to save the result.

    Et voilà 😉

    Download: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/ice/

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  • Remote access from PC to Android

    I wanted a simple web client to access my mobiles and tablets from my PC. I found and adopted Mobizen.

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    From a feature perspective, I was simply looking for something similar to the Google Chrome Remote Desktop or the Microsoft Remote Desktop but, if possible, without the need to install anything on the PC; i.e.: a purely web client mirroring an Android screen .

    I did test first AirDroid which is great, advanced, quite complete from a feature perspective. But first, it’s a bit too complex to “simply” remote access Android and next requires to install.

    I tried next Mobizen. This one is not as complete as AirDroid which comes with its own interface to access SMS, calls, files, photos, videos, contact, …, without the need to use the full remote access (mirroring the screen). But some of the missing features in Mobizen are already available in Beta.

    Here is what the remote access to my Galaxy S7, from Chrome, looks like.

    Mobizen Remote Web Access
    Mobizen Remote Web Access

    It requires an App on the Mobile: Mobizen mirroring. Nb.:A dedicated version exist for Samsung.

    Next to that, I am also using TeamViewer, which is great as the same product can be used in both direction. I.e.: with the TeamViewer “host” App for Android, PC’s can remotely access mobiles and tablets. And with the TeamViewer “for remote control” App for Android, mobiles and tablet can remotely access PC’s.

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  • PatchCleaner: a Must Have to remove unused “Windows Installer”

    Patch Cleaner
    Patch Cleaner

    PatchCleaner identifies redundant/orphaned installer files that can be deleted.

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    When applications are installed and updated on the Windows Operating System a hidden directory “c:\Windows\Installer” is used to store the installer (.msi) files and the patch (.msp) files.

    Generally these files are important as during updating, patching or uninstalling software it will use the .msi/.msp files. If you blanketly delete all the files in this folder, you will find yourself needing to rebuild windows.

    Over time as your computer is patched and patched again, these installer files become outdated and orphaned. They are no longer required, but they can take up many gigabytes of data.

    On my Windows 8, it reduced the content of C:\Windows\Installer from 24Gb to 8.2Gb !

    It’s IMO enough to illustrate its interest 😉

    NB.: DO NOT USE Windows UnUsed Files Cleanup Tool… It does not detect correctly unused installer as illustrated on the screenshot here bellow

    False Unused
    False Unused

    Download: http://www.homedev.com.au/free/patchcleaner

    PS.: to clean WinSxS, also look at http://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-cleanup-windows-8-1

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  • Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder

    Duplicate Photos Finder
    Duplicate Photos Finder

    This is a free simple but very efficient tool to find similar images or exact duplicates.

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    My favorite paid tool to do this is “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”. But although “Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder”‘s interface is less complete, it’s really excellent too.

    Pro’s:

    • It has an extremely simple user interface,clean and nice, as I like them.
    • It finds similar images or only exact duplicate photos if you tick the option “Search Only 100% Identical Pictures” in the menu Settings.
    • It searches through the various image types: JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF
    • It is able to compare pictures that was resized or with corrected colours (black and white photos for example).
    • You can search inside multiple folders or drives.
      • Better than “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”, you can simply drag and drop the folders into the interface.
      • It works with network drives and removable devices (USB etc.).
      • I prefer the folder browser of this tool as it’s faster than “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”, especially for network folders. Anyway, the easiest way to add network folders is also by drag and dropping them into the interface.
    • You can move or delete duplicate photos (or the originals) as well as open a File Explorer to browse the location of those duplicate photos (or the originals).
      • Deleted photos can b e moved into the recycle bin (this is an option).
      • Another option is to not be prompted to confirm the deletion.
    • You can sort the duplicate photos based on their location or on the location of the originals as well as on the rate of Similarity.
    • There is a standalone version.

    Con’s:

    • One cannot specify the minimal rate of Silimarity as one can do with “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”.
    • It’s not slow, but not IMO pushing the limits of the machine. On a Quad Core i7-3820 HyperThread 3.6GHz scanning 37.500 photos on a local drive, it took 85 minutes using less than 15% CPU and not saturating at all the IO (NB.: more pictures there are, slower it is!).
    • The setup version is reported by Avast as being infected by OpenCandy-D. This is just an adware but still, who wants that :/

    Download: http://www.duplicate-finder.com/photo.html

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  • Put Windows PC’s display to sleep immediately

    Wizmo
    Wizmo

    When I watch a movie, I like to be in the complete dark… But if my PC is running, the screens are sources of light… Here is how to create a keyboard shortcut turning the screens off immediately, using “Wizmo”.

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    As I am lazy and don’t want to turn off the monitors manually using their power button, I looked for a solution to put the screens to sleep immediately – without waiting for the screen saver to turn off the display as configured in the Control Panel > Power Options > Plan Settings… – using a keyboard shortcut.

    I found a a first solution based on “NirCmd“: Download it and create a desktop shortcut (assigned with a keyboard shortcut) to: nircmd.exe cmdwait 1000 monitor off

    That solution didn’t work fine for me. Indeed, after a few minutes, the screens were always turning back on magically… I didn’t find for sure the reason why, but it could be that my wireless mouse (Logitech) is not 100% quite although untouched…

    So, I looked for an alternative and found “Wizmo“. Download it and use it in a desktop shortcut (also assigned with a keyboard shortcut) to: wizmo.exe monoff shake=99

    This will eliminate the minor mouse “shake” that a wireless mouse seems to have and which is turning the monitor back on, while allowing you to still wiggle the mouse a bit to turn your monitor back on. (Notice: Wizmo won’t run if you copy it into %WinDir%\System32 !)

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  • Use Filebot to rename media files (and folders)

    FileBot
    FileBot

    Since I am using Plex, I don’t spent time anymore to rename correctly the movies. I am only using their title for the parent folder. For series however I have, per PLEX requirement, to prefix each episode with the name of the serie + SxxEyy where xx = season and yy = episode number. I decided however recently to do some clean-up on the filenames (rename them with the exact movie title, the movie year, the video format, the audio format, etc…). As Plex can’t do that, I am using Filebot.

    Click to Read More

    In the past, I was a great fan of Media Browser 2.x. I was using MetaVideoEditor to download the metadata for my movies. When MetaVideoEditor ended to work (not updated anymore to download the metadata from the providers), I looked for alternatives. Alternatives to MetaVideoEditor but also possibly to Media Browser. I found Plex, coming with a media server for Synology, a media player for HTPC or Samsung TV, and its own metadata downloader. I found Plex much more mature than Media Browser 3.x and I loved that Plex Server was running on my NAS. Plex was based on XBMC but much simpler to configure and much more user friendly, especially for kids. And its metadata downloader was perfect. There was however one difference with MetaVideoEditor: it was not renaming the media file with their title, episode number, etc…

    But that’s not an issue as I found Filebot, a TV and Movies renamer much better than any other similar software! It’s really amazing! It renames not only movies and episodes but also subtitles, audio files, poster (jpg, …), metadata file (xml, nfo) and checksum files (SFV, MD5, SHA-1, ED2K).

    Filebot can query various providers to fetch the rename of your files: TheTVDB, AniDB, TVRAge, Serienjunkies, TheMovieDB, IMBd, OpenSubtitles. And icing on the cake, it can rename those files using your own format. I.e. you can define which information must be used to rename the files including media info extracted from the files thanks to the well know library mediaInfo. You can also call functions to transform this information like removing or replacing blanks and special characters, etc…

    Ex.: if you use a format like this one to rename a file “The.Man.from.earth.Ripped.by.MySelf.from.BlueRay.XYZ“: {n} ({y}) {vf} {af}, the nale will become “The Man from Earth (2007) 720p 6ch” because “n” is a tag replaced by the name of the movie fetched from one of the provider mentionned above. “y” is the movie year. “vf” is the standard video format. “af” is the audio channels. See more tags here.

    Notice that you MUST install Java x64 on your machine if you have Windows x64. Otherwise, filebot will fail to load mediainfo’s libraries. You will see the following error when trying to use custom pattern to rename the files: “BindingException: “vf”: Could not initialize class net.filebot.mediainfo.MediaInfoLibrary.

    Also, asking filebot for information, in a command prompt run in C:\Program Files\FileBot, you will clearly see that there is an issue. It thinks you are on a Windows x86:

    C:\Program Files\FileBot> filebot -script fn:sysinfo FileBot 4.1 (r2245) JNA Native: 4.0.0 MediaInfo: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Unable to load library ‘mediainfo’: Native library (win32-x86/mediainfo.dll) not found in resource path ([file:/C:/Program%20Files/FileBot/FileBot.jar]) Jun 02, 2014 12:54:34 AM net.filebot.archive.SevenZipLoader requireNativeLibraries WARNING: Failed to preload library: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no mingwm10 in java.library.path 7-Zip-JBinding: net.sf.sevenzipjbinding.SevenZipNativeInitializationException: Failed to load 7z-JBinding: C:\Program Files\FileBot\7-Zip-JBinding.dll: Can’t load AMD 64-bit .dll on a IA 32-bit platform chromaprint-tools: fpcalc version 1.1.0 (C:\Program Files\FileBot\fpcalc.exe) Extended Attributes: OK Groovy Engine: 2.3.2 JRE: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 1.7.0_51 JVM: 32-bit Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM OS: Windows 7 (x86) Done ?(?????)?

    Go to the manual download page of Java to get the x64. Otherwise, using a x86 browser, you would get the x86 version of java by default.

    1. Once filebot installed, run it and select the “Rename” tab.
    2. Drag and drop the media files to be renamed in the “Original Files” tab. If you want to renamed series, drag & drop the root folder (For Plex, this folder has the name of the serie and contains one subfolder “Season xx” per season.). Notice that it will take time to load all the files but you won’t see any progress bar or spinning hourglass. Be patient!!!
    3. Once the files loaded, you will see an icon next to each one (on the right) mentioning the type of file (jpg, mkv, nfo, xml, …). Each of those files will be renamed. This will therefore maintain the “link” between the existing metadata and the media itself, for players like XBMC, etc…
    4. Right click on the “Match” button to select “Preference”. There, select the language of your media. “Titles” will be fetched from the providers in that language.
    5. Right click on the “Match” button to select “Edit Format” (if you want to customize it). It opens a “Format” window
    6. At the bottom of that window, click on the button “Switch to …” to select the type of media you are going to rename: Movie, Music or Episode.This is important as all tags don’t works for all type of media. Ex.: the tab {e}, “Episode Numbers”, does not exist for movies or music. The type of media you have selected is display in the title bar of the window.
    7. Bellow the format, click on “(x)=” to select one sample of media. It will show you the media information retrieved with the mediainfo library. This preview can help you to find the Tag you need for you custom format.
    8. Now, type you own format. Various samples can be found here. For my series and my movies, I am using respectively:
      {n.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} - {s00e00} - {episode.title.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} [{vf}.{vc}.{ac}]
      {n.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} ({y}) [{fn.match(/3D/)+"."}{fn.matchAll(/H-OU|H-TAB|HSBS|H-SBS|Half-SBS|Full-SBS|F-SBS|SBS/).join('.').replace('Half-','H-').replace('Full-','F-').replace('TAB','OU').replace('HSBS','H-SBS')+"."}{vf}.{vc}.{ac}] {" CD$pi"}
    9. Once the expression to format completed, click on Use Format. This will close the window.
    10. Right click on Match and select the provider to be used (depending on the type of media to be renamed). Filebot will immediately start to fetch the meta data from that provider and display a preview of the New Names. You will see a spinning icon in the upper right corner indicating that the operation is in progress.
    11. Once completed, you can check that everything is fine in the preview before clicking on “Rename” to execute the actual renaming.

    Filebot can not only rename the files but also move them if you include a path in the format. Ex. to move Avatar.mkv into a folder like X:/Movies/Avatar Collection/Avatar (2009) /Avatar (2009).mkv, use a format like: X:/Movies/{n} ({y}).

    I use the following expression to renamed the folders of my movies:

    ../{n.replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} ({y})/{n.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} ({y}) [{fn.match(/3D/)+"."}{fn.matchAll(/H-OU|H-TAB|HSBS|H-SBS|Half-SBS|Full-SBS|F-SBS|SBS/).join('.').replace('Half-','H-').replace('Full-','F-').replace('TAB','OU').replace('HSBS','H-SBS')+"."}{vf}.{vc}.{ac}] {" CD$pi"}

    Actually the folder is not renamed, but the file is moved into a new folder instead. So, there are plenty of empty folders remaining on the system (or folder that contain only files not renamed with the movies…). To delete them run the following “groovy script” provided by filebot (in a cmd prompt run as administrator):

    c:\Program Files\FileBot>filebot.exe -script fn:cleaner "\Path\To\Your\Movies" 2> filebot-error.log 1> filebot.log

    If you don’t want to cleanup the empty folders without checking what will be deleted, run the same script in ‘test’ mode first and look at the log file…

    c:\Program Files\FileBot>filebot.exe -script fn:cleaner "\Path\To\Your\Movies" --action test 2> filebot-error.log 1> filebot.log

     

    Notice, “Advanced Renamer” can also do it but it’s not as easy. One has indeed to use javascript within “Advanced Renamer” to get access to the complete exif information. it means that a Filebot’s tag as simple as {vf} becomes in Advanced Renamed:

    [js]var format = ”;
    var w = item.exifToolValue(‘ImageWidth’);
    var h = item.exifToolValue(‘ImageHeight’);

    if (w == 0) {
    format = ”;
    } else if (w < 1280) {
    if (h < 576) {
    format = ‘SD NTSC’;
    } else {
    format = ‘SD PAL-SECAM’;
    }
    } else if (w < 1920) {
    format = ‘HD 720p’;
    }
    else if (w < 3840) {
    format = ‘HD 1080p’;
    }
    else if (w < 7680) {
    format = ‘UHD 4K’;
    }
    else {
    format = ‘UHD 8K’;
    }

    return item.newBasename + ‘(‘ + format + ‘)’;

    [/js]

    Download: http://www.filebot.net/

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  • Software Uninstaller: Revo

    Revo Uninstaller
    Revo Uninstaller

    Since a long time now, I am used to uninstall software with the free version of Revo Uninstaller. First, it can remove software that do not appear in Windows’s installed software” list or whose classic uninstallation failed. Next, it comes with an advanced “Cleanup” feature to remove any registry entry or files left by the software after its uninstallation.

    Click to Read More

    The free version does not monitor your PC to capture actions made by installer… So, it does not make your PC slower.

    Usually, I know the name of the application I want to uninstall, so I use the Search Box to find it instead of scrolling among 100th of Icons. That feature was the main reason why I started to use Revo with previous versions of Windows, in addition to the fact that the information displayed was more complete than within Windows’ native uninstaller.

    I use Revo only to uninstall apps… But the free version does a bit more:

    • With the Hunter mode, you can drag the Hunter window over desktop icons, quick launch toolbar, system tray icons, or program’s window to get access to menus to uninstall, kill, locate, … the focused application. This is unfortunately not working fine on my PC. For some reason, the Hunter window is unable to identify the focused applications…
    • It also comes with an AutoRun Manager to disable/re-enable startup applications, run them, kill, them, etc… However, I am still used to CodeStuff Starter and Procexp for such tasks.

    I admit also that with Windows 8.1, the native “Uninstall a Program” is now as user friendly as Revo. In addition, I noticed that Revo doesn’t display all the installed software anymore, at least on Windows 8.1 🙁

    The only reason why I am still using Revo is because Windows is missing the advanced “Cleanup” feature that removes orphan files and registry entries.

    Download: http://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_uninstaller_free_download.html

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  • File Recovery Software: Recurva

    Recuva
    Recuva

    Recuva is IMHO the very best Recovery Software. It is user friendly and much more effective than many other freeware I have tested. And it comes with a free version that is only missing the “support” service.

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    How has never deleted files by accident and only noticed after making his Recycle Bin empty? Or how has never reinstalled Windows for formatted a drive before backuping his important files?

    With Recurva, there is still a “good” chance to recover some of the “lost files” if not all…

    Concretely, Recurva has simple wizards to

    • Undelete files on your computer
    • Recovery from damaged or formatted disks
    • Recover deleted emails
    • Recover deleted iPod music
    • Restore unsaved Word documents
    • Deep Scan for deleted files when quick methods doesn’t find them
    • Securely delete files you want to erase forever

    Recurva also comes with a portable version.

    Download: https://www.piriform.com/recuva

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  • Install and Update All Your Programs at Once with Ninite

    Ninite Installer
    Ninite Installer

    Most of my favorite freewares can be installed at once using this great free software: Ninite.

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    I have just reinstalled one of my PC (not booting anymore after the update of NVidia graphic drivers). As usually, immediately after the fresh setup, I reinstall all my favorite pieces of software:

    1. Chrome
    2. VLC
    3. K-Lite Codecs
    4. Java
    5. Paint.Net
    6. FastStone
    7. Foxit Reader
    8. Avast
    9. FileZilla
    10. Notepad++
    11. TeamViewer
    12. Revo Uninstaller
    13. 7-Zip

    That could be a lot of work. Fortunately, I only have to tick those on the Ninite website and a get a “Ninite installer” customized for my own need. Running that one, all the selected apps are installed silently :p

    No registration, No Spam, No Adware, No Worm, No Crap 8)

    Ninite Selector
    Ninite Selector

    Website: https://ninite.com/

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