Easily Re-Size Photos in Windows Vista or XP
Now that the presents have been opened, large dinners consumed, and relatives (good or bad) have visited it is time to take all of those digital images and get them organized. Today's digital cameras take great, detailed photos but the images are often too large to easily send.
If you have large amounts of storage space available you may want to keep the originals, but if you want to email these pictures and publish them on your blogs, having smaller file sizes is preferred. Today we will look at some free tools that will allow you to easily resize your photos in Vista and XP.
Resize Photos on XP with Image Resizer PowerToy
The Image Resizer PowerToy for XP has been around for several years and does a great job of resizing an image by right clicking it.
After right-clicking and choosing "Resize Pictures" you get an easy to use menu for making an image larger, smaller, or a custom size.
As an example this image came directly off a digital camera and as you can see it is half a Megabyte - having several photos this size can start to add up in a hurry. By making the image smaller we save a lot of space.
Using Microsoft Office Picture Manager
This is a great solution if you have Microsoft Office Suite installed. This allows you to edit different aspects of your photos and of course resize them. This is also a great solution if you are placing pictures in other office applications.
Resizing Photos In Vista Using VSO Image Resizer
VSO Image Resizer is a free (for private use) utility that works similar to XP's PowerToy on Vista. After installing you can right click an image and select VSO from the context menu. Unfortunately every time you launch VSO, you will need to click through the license message. The good thing is there is a lot of functionality and it definitely gets the job done.
Using Windows Live Photo Gallery
With Windows Live Photo Gallery we can easily resize, adjust, and post photos to the web or email. You can upload and publish photos on Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa as well as several other photo sites directly from Photo Gallery.
If you're just doing a couple pictures to email the stand alone photo resizer applications might be a good choice. On the other hand, if you want to resize several photo’s at once post them on the Internet, Windows Live Photo Gallery is a solid comprehensive solution as it also includes several Plug-ins for different sites.
What are some of your favorite ways to edit and organize photos?
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irfanview (www.irfanview.net/ … freeware) is great for all of my 'simple' image editing needs. many of you may like it as well.
it can be as simple or robust as the user wishes.
Fotosizer (http://www.fotosizer.com/) is a nice freeware program for batch resizing.
i also use irfanview … but alot of options arent good for the novice computer user .. so i am always lloking for something "simpler" for other people
Irfy is my choice, too. With it I can crop, lower the resolution as well as resize, and recover from photo booboos like red-eye, snow overwhelming brightness, poor lighting, etc. But the tools you mentioned will do a good quick job if your photos are pretty good to start with.
Ctrl+R in irfanview rocks!! how can u miss dat - easies,best,most options for resize
Microsoft's Image resizer for XP power toy is very useful and Freestone photo resizer which also a freeware does the same job.
The newest version of Picasa (ver. 3) from Google (free) does a really excellent job as well. We received a digital picture frame for Christmas, and it displays at 16:9 ratio. Picasa has a 16:9 preset as one of the cropping choices. Easy. Also removes red eye as well as offering some other common editing functions. No, I don't work for Google.
What about the Prish resizer for Vista? Works great!
http://blogs.msdn.com/cumgranosalis/pages/image-resizer-download-page.aspx
Can anyone help me with an issue with the Image Resizer Power Toy. I can install it just fine, but when I right click on a photo and select resize image the dialog box comes up to select the size to resize the image to and I select one then click OK. But then after that there is no new resized picture.
Jason, the window may not be refreshing itself after the new resized file is created, press F5 to refresh the display and see if the new file appears.
The pros use Adobe® Bridge - Pikasa by google - free does a good job.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!
You made this so much easier then Microsofts actual website!!