Image
resizing is an important aspect of the on-line world. At
times we need high resolution images for documentation or printing
requirements. However, the bulk of the time our 10 mega-pixel
cameras just make life difficult. Despite what you
believe no one wants a 3200x2800 30meg images of your newborn baby
bloating their mailbox or message board. The program Picasa
is a good entry level free photo editing tool. You can obtain
Picasa in the "Google Pack", and install it by itself without the other
programs. A link can be found at the top of this page.
Start by opening Picasa and choosing a directory on your hard
drive to work from. If this is your first time running Picasa
it may want to scan you entire drive for photos. Due to the
time associated with this I suggest only letting it scan you desktop.
For this write up I navigated to my desktop as shown below.
Once you
have selected the directory you want to work with, you will be provided
with thumbnail images of every file in that directory. Select the image you want to resize by clicking on
it once. Then click "export" located at the bottom right of
the screen.
Below you
can see the export option highlighted in yellow. The next
entry you need to make is where to put the images. This is
done by changing the targeted directory in the blue box. I
usually work off the desktop as it makes locating the images I have
resized easy to locate. Images you export in Picasa
do not effect the original. So if you have a
1000x800px file on your desktop called 1.jpg and you export
it to directory in desktop\temp, you will have two files. The
original un-touched file and your newly exported file in the temp
directory. Now set the size and compression you want to use.
For message board and general photos 800px is usually good.
If it needs to be a large image or desktop image you may want
to go to something higher like 1024 or 1600. This is shown in
the red boxes. The final option is the amount of compression
you want to use. If you are using the windows version of
Picasa I suggest you select "Automatic'. For unix and Mac
versions though you need to set a percentage. 85% is almost
always a good compression. If you need to preserve a lot of
very fine detail 100% is better but will make the file size considerably
larger.
The
movie below shows the same steps for Picasa in a Windows environment. Click the green play button on the left to start the video
