Batch Resizing and Cropping

I am trying to find software to batch resize normal rectangular photos from a

camera to a square format and reducing it to about 170 pixels square. The

problem is that most of the software to do this just reduces or stretches the

rectangular image either just making it smaller or causing distortion. I have

tried a lot of software such as easyphoto, jpegcrops, quickresizer and viualizer

but none of them creates an undistorted square image. For various reasons I

don't want to use complex software like Photoshop. Does anyone have any ideas

please?

Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom has a built in cropping tool in the Develop module and one of the cropping presets is a square. When you go to export you set the dimensions you want Lightroom to output the photo as but the original remains uncropped.

<a href="http://www.imagemagick.org/">ImageMagick</a> will handle it easily, as long as you don't mind a command-line interface.

Thanks for your help I'll give it a try.