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Everyone has a digital camera these days, yet hardly anyone seems to know how to resize pictures to post on the web or send in an email. Even people that do know how to do it probably don't because it can be a pain. You have to open up your image editing program, choose all the pictures you want to resize, choose the size and quality, choose a location to save to, and finally post it to your blog or send in an email to friends and family. I think I've found the most quick and painless way to resize your digital pics - the Image Resizer PowerToy. The Image Resizer PowerToy is one of several neat little programs for Windows XP that come straight from Microsoft and its programmers. They're basically things that the programmers wished they could have included in the final build of Windows XP, but never made it. Luckily for us, they developed them and offer them for free. TweakUI is another PowerToy that I install on all my computers. It allows you to tweak dozens of annoying Windows settings, like turning off those stupid yellow balloons that pop up from the system tray. Sure, you could edit the registry to make these changes, but this is a much easier (and less geeky) way to do it.
Anyway, back to Image Resizer. You can download it and all of the other PowerToys here. The beauty of Image Resizer is in its simplicity. It's not
a program that you have to run. After you install it, you'll have a new Resize Pictures option when you right-click on an image or group of images. You can then choose to resize your pictures to a small, medium, or large size, or you can choose a custom size. By default, Image Resizer saves the resized pictures in the same folder with small, medium, or large appended to the end of the filename. Your original pictures stay intact. It couldn't be any easier.If you're posting your pictures to the web or sending in an email, I'd recommend using the small or medium size. If linking to a large picture, the Large (1024 x 768) works great. It fills up the screen without requiring people to scroll horizontally or vertically.
If you are in details view in My Computer or Windows Explorer you can see how big a difference in file size resizing makes. For example, I resized a full-size picture from my 3-megapixel digital camera from 1,240 KB to 73 KB at medium size and 51 KB at small size. That's a 1/17 and 1/24 reduction in file size, respectively! So please, resize your pictures with Image Resizer, and save the rest of us the hassle of downloading your huge pics!
