Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 55: Batch-Resize Photos

Level Easy

Platform Windows

Cost Free

Everyone likes emailing digital photos, but no one likes receiving pictures that are so huge they take forever to download and require you to scroll left and right and up and down to see the entire image. Luckily, with just two clicks or a simple drag and drop, you can easily resize a large group of photos that you downloaded from your digital camera.

Batch Resizing on Windows

Image Resizer is a free utility that plugs into Windows Explorer. Following explains how to easily resize a batch of pictures using this tool:

1. Download and install Image Resizer from the right side of the page at http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/.

2. Browse to any folder where you store your digital photos, select the photos you want to resize, right-click, and choose Resize Pictures from the context menu to open the Image Resizer dialog box. Click the Advanced button to see all the options, as shown in Figure 6-17.

3. From there, choose one of the Image Resizer suggested dimensions, or enter your custom width and height. Be sure to select the Make Pictures Smaller but Not Larger option if you don’t want to size up — and you won’t, because making digital photos larger degrades quality. Click OK.

By default, Image Resizer creates copies of the files and adds the chosen size to the filename. For example, if your original photo filename was Jeremy001.jpg and you resized it using the Small setting, the new version will be named Jeremy001 ...