I’m posting this with a demo copy BlogJet.  BlogJet is a blogging client that supports a variety of weblog systems (including MovableType).  It is commercial software with a price tag in the $20-30 range.

I installed it because I am looking to dramatically streamline the effort of posting images in my blog.  As it is, I haven’t bothered posting any images because I’m lazy.

I was hoping that BlogJet would do the job.  It doesn’t.

First off, if you simply drag a photo off your local disk into the browser window, it gives an error because it is a local file.  This is strange,  because it has a button for inserting a picture that lets you pick a picture from the local filesystem which it will presumably upload to the server when you make the post.

The second annoyance is that it doesn’t seem to do much with the photo.  I can resize it, but its just modifies the size tag, it doesn’t resize the image, so anyone who views the page ends up downloading the full=sized file, which the browser then does a crappy job of resizing.

This is what I think BlogJet and every other rich blogging client should do.

1. Support drag and drop of images from the local filesystem.
2. Automatically resize the image into a preselected thumbnail size using a high quality resizing algorithm.
3. Allow the optional but automatic creation of a larger image linked from the thumbnail.
4. Allow customization of the JPEG quality settings.
5. Allow very basic image editing.  I think cropping should be enough, though one could also make the the case that adjusting levels should be added.  Anything more though should really be the domain of an image editing tool
6. Only generate the resized images when the entry is posted so you can tweak things without degrading things.
7. Automatically upload the images when the entry is posted.

I’ve looked at Zempt, MTClient, Bloggar, BlogJet and Ecto.  None of them really come close.  Most don’t support any image operations beyond embedding and uploading it to the server.  Ecto has a little file-upload tool that creates thumbnails, but it doesn’t have a what-you-see-is-roughly-what-you-get editor for the HTML (in fact, the editor doesn’t even try to do a nice job of formatting the HTML source).

Other than that, BlogJet seems pretty slick. I’d buy it if it just had improved image support.  I think it would appeal to far more people than the “Attach Voice” functionality.