AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

We’ve all done it, taken lots of digital pictures, copied them to our computers and emailed them to our friends and family, only to have it take forever to mail or to get comments from them letting us know that the pictures either were too big to view, or that they were so big that they locked up the computer.  Microsoft PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What are they? PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released. One of the programs is an Image resizer. Go to the link above, scroll down until you find Image Resizer on the right column. Click on that link to download it. Once you download and install the program, it adds an option to the right-click menu to resize images. To use it, go to the folder in Windows Explorer that contains your pictures. Right-click on a picture and choose “Resize Pictures”. An option window opens and allows you to choose the size of the picture and a few other options. Most people are using the 1024×768 resolution on their monitors so you’d be safe using this setting most of the time. 800×600 works well too. You can see in this example (http://www.askbillfirst.com/images/PictureResizer.jpg) that picture IMG_4062 resized from 2.2 mb in size to a fraction on that (132 kb). You can select multiple images and resize them at the same time. I haven’t notice any loss in picture quality and sending pictures in a much smaller size is appreciated by all. The other benefit of this is that I end up with a much smaller file on my computer which saves me hard disk space for other things. Vista doesn’t have the same PowerToys but a nice, free image resizer can be downloaded from http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/. You can watch their YouTube video on the same page to see how it works. It’s similar.

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