Despite the fact that MoboDojo is a website which thrives on the discovery and exploitation of tools and gadgets, the Dojo doesn’t generally run reviews on utility software. Why? Because most utility software just isn’t all that interesting. Yes, we do review software like games and productivity packages, but those are interesting. So, why are we reviewing ImageWell, a Mac-only application? Simply put, its almost literally the only tool we use other than FireFox and our sharp minds to create the Dojo for you. Besides, they just went commercial with the product and I personally wanted to give the developer a shout-out.

Now, with the preamble out of the way, what is ImageWell? To keep a long story short, ImageWell allows you to take images from any source, crop,  edit, and resize them, and send them (via FTP and a wide range of other services) to your web server. It then thoughtfully places the URL to that image in your clipboard so you can quickly add an image to a story, much in the way I did for the image of ImageWell you see above. I found it interesting that, despite ImageWell’s integrated screen capture utility, I was required to use Grab.app to capture ImageWell. It can’t capture itself, which is really a feature and not a bug. Really.

ImageWell is, without a doubt, one of the best designed and most utile utilities I’ve used in a very long time. It cleanly and reliably integrates a range of functions for which I would have to normally use an image editor, ftp client, and a watermarking utility to complete. If that wasn’t enough, ImageWell gives access to all of these tools in a fast and functional manner, dramatically cutting the time we need to preparing images to post with our stories. Best of all, its a mere US$20 for the privilege. It can post to a local folder, Apple’s iDisk, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Flickr, SmugMug, and ImageShack.

In a nutshell, before ImageWell, we didn’t post many images as they just took too much time. Now… well you can see that we post images with just about every story now. Its worth it. If you work on a Mac and post images anywhere or just need a fast way to edit and crop images, you need ImageWell. If you don’t own a Mac, get one. Don’t worry, you can run Windows applications on the Mac using Parallels or VMware’s awesome Fusion for Mac.

written by Tyler Regas