How to Resize a Digital Picture

In the interest of making my life better, (and yours, too!) I think it would be good to share with people how to resize a digital photo. This is a very easy thing to do and a very important item to have in your skill set - especially if you regularly upload pictures to the 'Net or send them via email.

If you don't know why size matters, read on.

Any image you want to put online will look dandy at 72 dpi - it only stops looking dandy if you try to print it. (Rule of thumb: 72 is good to view - like that rhyme I just made up?) A photo at 72 dpi allows you to use a file that is relatively small. Smaller files are good because:

1. They load faster (Who wants to wait for a huge picture to load? Not your viewers, that's for sure!); and
2. They take up less storage space (less is more when you're dealing with online galleries that limit your available storage space).

So it's really in everyone's best interest to have smaller files. 

If you know enough to get your photo uploaded onto the Internet, you probably already have a photo editing program. Adobe Photoshop Elements is what I've been working with for the last ten years - very user friendly - can;t say enough good about it.

No matter which program you use, however, they're all set up with the same basic organizational logic.

BUT BEFORE WE DO ANYTHING... please remember it's a good rule of thumb to never edit your original photo. Open your original photo ("Halloween Card" for this example) and save it as something else ("Halloween Card copy"). If you always perform your edits on a copy of the original, your original will always remain protected and safe.  

Okay, on with the show!

In Photoshop Elements select File > Save For Web. This opens up a box which allows you to choose what size you want. As an illustration, the Halloween card I posted earlier today originally clocked in at 28M! (Can we say HUGE?! I forgot to change the settings on my camera.)

When I choose Save For Web, I get a new window which shows me my original photo and my new version side-by-side. The new version defaults to "low" - in this case bringing the file size down to 317k.  I can also select "medium" which increases my file size to about 800k. I can go to "high" but why bother? Low is a teensy, tiny bit more pixelated than my original photo, and medium looks exactly like my photo.

Here's the photo (size 317k):

And here it is at 800k:

As you can see, it looks just dandy at either size! But it will load ten times faster and take up much less space than 28M.

By the way, most photos I take of cards are much smaller. I usually set my camera to its "good" photo setting when I take a picture of my projects - which means that most of my pictures are usually 1M - 2M - which means they usually end up being about 100k - 200k once they've been resized for uploading onto the Web.

I think Picasa (a fabulous and free program - click on link to download) may automatically resize your photos when you upload them to the Internet, but I haven't used Picasa in years, so you might want to do a test drive. (If anybody can verify that, please feel free.)

Irfanview is another free internet download that definitely will allow you to resize your photos. Although I have never used it, it comes highly recommended.

If anyone knows of a better way, faster way, etc, please leave a comment and I'll update this post.

Hope this helps!

Comments

[Vianna]

Regarding resizing photos for the Web:
Windows XP has an easy built-in option to re-size graphics for posting. Using your Windows Explorer (NOT the Internet Explorer), go to where your photo is saved. Right-click your photo and select RESIZE. The newly created file will have the same name as the original file followed by the word SMALL in parenthesis (small). And that's that - the easiest method to re-size, at least for me.