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Modern digital cameras can take very high quality photos. This is great if you want to print them, use them for publication in a magazine, or something along those lines.

What it isn’t great for, though, is emailing these photos to someone. The sheer file size usually is too big for the restrictions on a typical email account, especially if you have to send more than one. Even if this isn’t the case, the resolution of most cameras far outstrips the resolution of even the best computer monitors, making viewing them kind of like studying a barn door through a pinhole, unless some sort of scaling is used. But when you do scale, you lose the resolution that the camera is capable of anyway, so you might as well send the smaller image to begin with.
Resizing a single photo is an easy enough job with a free program like Irfanview, available at http://www.irfanview.com/. But what if you’ve got several photos, and you need to do it several times a month or more?

That’s where a program like Visualizer Photo Resize (http://www.freeimagebrowser.com/resize/) comes in. It’s free for personal use, and very easy to use. It only resizes JPEG files, but that’s the file format that most modern digital cameras seem to use, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
In this tutorial, we’re going to use the sample pictures that come with Microsoft Windows XP. By default, these are located in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\Sample Pictures

If you haven’t yet downloaded and installed Visualizer Photo Resize, do that now.

Double-click the icon on the desktop for the program, seen to the right of the Sample Pictures window in the above image.

If this is the first time you’ve started the program, you’ll see a splash screen. You can easily disable this on future starts by checking the box in the bottom left corner.

When the program starts, you’ll see a window that looks something like this:

On the right are the options, which you configure for the files you want to resize.

Click the folder icon to the right of the Read JPG images from path: box, and it will bring up your folder selection dialog.

To use the Microsoft sample pictures, we’re going to select the folder C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\Sample Pictures then click OK.

The default location for the resized images is in a folder called resized. This is found within the folder that the original images were from. So in this case, our resized images will be in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\Sample Pictures\resized
A Max Pixel Width of 640 and Max Pixel Height of 480 respectively is a pretty good standard size to email, so make sure these two values are set to this for now. As you get used to the program, you can play with these values as needed.

Now, click the Resize button at the bottom right corner of the window, and the process will start. All files in the selected folder ending with the .jpg extension will be resized. If you also use the .jpeg extension, which some photo software does, make sure the Read JPEG extension checkbox is checked before clicking Resize.

When the process is complete, you can easily access your resized photos by clicking the folder icon to the right of the Save to subfolder text area. This will pop up an explorer window to the resized folder.

As you can see, the folder on the right is the resized folder, and the one on the left is the original. In this case, we’ve changed an 800 x 600 27.8 Kilobyte image to a 640 x 480 20.0 Kilobyte image. This isn’t really much of a difference, but we’re only dealing with sample images, here. A 3.2 MegaPixel digital camera puts out images at 2048 x 1536 resolution, which can easily reach filesizes of a MegaByte or more. Obviously, resizing images from such a camera will have a much larger effect than the sample images used here.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 2:56 pm and is filed under How-to's and Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.