How to Resize Pictures

Many of us send pictures to friends and family. Some of us need to send work related pictures. Often, these pictures are huge and really shouldn't be sent as email attachments. So, what we'd really like, is a very easy, simple way to reduce the size of these pictures. We'd like them to display nicely on a computer screen, or perhaps print a small picture. We don't need them to hold the detail needed for an 8x11 portrait.

Image Resizer is a free and open source program that is a clone of a powertoys add-on for Windows XP. It was written for Vista and Windows 7 users. It adds a resize option to the right click menu in your file manager when you point to a picture.

After installing this free program, point to a picture from Windows explorer and right click on the new Resize Pictures option.

It presents this menu.

When you select one and click ok, you'll get a new copy of the picture with small, medium, large or mobile added to the name. You don't lose the original picture, you get an additional copy. It is not unusual for a resized picture to be 50 times smaller. This makes it much better for attaching to an email.

So simple.

Note! as you make pictures smaller and make new jpg files from them, they will lose some detail and normally won't be as good as the original if you want to print detailed pictures for a family album or a brochure. This is to let people see them nicely on a computer screen, not to print fine images.