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FREE Windows 2000, XP, and Vista programs for reducing the size of your pictures

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As digital cameras keep increasing the resolution -- and size! -- of digital pictures, and as pictures become more and more an integral part of the lives of Realtors, home inspectors, and others, if they haven't already, we increasingly need a way to manage the size of the digital picture files taking up space on our computers. And we won't even talk about digital video and audio files.

PROBLEM: A few months ago I bought a new computer running Windows Vista. A few weeks ago I bought a new digital SLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi. On my old Windows XP computer, I had a batch processor for reducing picture size that, unfortunately, doesn't run on Windows Vista. My new Canon Rebel XSi camera takes pictures that are, for the most part, sizable, huge, gigantic, big, Tom Hanks, monster, collosal, enormous, humongous, and mammoth.

SOLUTION FOR WINDOWS XP: Go to Microsoft's web site and download their Image Resizer. It's one of their Windows XP Power Toys. Once you download it and install it, all you have to is select the pictures you want to resize, right click on them, choose your options, and click on okay. I've done as many as 500 pictures in just one minute. Here's the link for Windows XP Image Resizer. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen. On the right side, five from the bottom, is the link to Image Resizer. Download, install, and batch-process away!

SOLUTION FOR WINDOWS VISTA: Seems I'm not the only one who misses Windows XP Image Resizer. Fortunately, someone has come to the rescue. AND IT'S FREE! That someone is VSO Software! It's only slightly -- very slightly -- less elegant than Windows XP Image Resizer because the FREE download is for personal use and it reminds you of that each time you right click on your pictures to resize them. If you choose to buy the commercial program, it's regularly $25 but is on sale right now for $15. For you professional photographers, VSO's Image Resizer also handles the RAW format from Canon (CR2), Nikon (NEF), and Minolta (MRW), as well as many other formats. VSO's Image Resizer also works under Windows 2000 and Windows XP in case you have multiple computers running different operating systems.

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This week's blog posts (they will open in a new window)

Foto Friday: Don't blow your top! - 6/12/09
It's okay to be personal (slide show included) - 6/11/09
WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): Anyone you know? - 6/10/09
Where do you get your energy? - 6/9/09
Is someone you know slithering? Help them out! - 6/9/09
Is everything you try being blocked by someone? - 6/8/09

Last week's blog posts (they will open in a new window)

Life series - 55 posts, various dates, most recently on 6/5/09
Guerrilla Marketing series - 5 posts, various dates, most recently on 5/31/09
How I turned a 20-minute walk into a healthy 3-hour stroll - 6/7/09
SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): East San Diego County's tallest and highest cross - 6/7/09
Points matter, but you still have to answer your phone - 6/7/09
Are you sending a mixed message? - 6/6/09
A Quiz: What's in a (star's) name? - 6/6/09
Thinker's Thursday: Zoey the Cool Cat - 6/4/09
WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): SD&R&R - 6/3/09
Tattoos aren't just for people anymore: The Ultimate Tattoo - 6/3/09
Are you a big fish or a small fish? - 6/2/09

Previous week's blog posts (they will open in a new window)

SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): The world's largest rodent - 5/31/09
SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): Baby flamingo at the San Diego Zoo - 5/31/09
SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): It's okay to hide sometimes.... - 5/31/09
Was the United States founded as a Christian nation? - 5/31/09
SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): A meerkat lesson on community support - 5/31/09
Do points matter? Unequivocally, YES! - 5/30/09
Know where your target audience hangs out - 5/29/09
Windows Vista update - 5/28/09
Sometimes it's okay to call attention to yourself.... - 5/28/09
Sometimes we need a little help.... - 5/25/09

Helpful blog posts for ActiveRain newbies (I guess you know they'll open in a new window)

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Posted by Russel Ray, San Diego Marketing & Business Consultant on 06/12/2009 08:54 PM

Comments (15)

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15 Comments on FREE Windows 2000, XP, and Vista programs for reducing the size of your pictures

JUN

What great tips and I wish I had known about these things a lot time ago. The photo is grea! It certainly inspires.

I use IrfanView to resize and even to write over your pictures if you need to.

Russell, There's nothing better than FREE. I'm with Joan on this. After getting my new laptop I was in a quandary because my Photoshop no longer worked with Vista. I ended up getting paintshop to re-size my photos. Our Canon Rebel XTi makes those Tom Hanks, BIG size photos also.

Russel,

I load all the listing photos into my machine and then email them to myself with outlook. It let's me specifiy the size of the images and then I just highlight them all and copy and paste them right back into a folder labeled "small" for loading on my website.

Russel, that's a great find - thanks! So many programs don't work with Vista that it's almost like starting over.

I didn't even know I needed to resize my photos :-)

Thanks for the information.

Does it work on video, too. Because that's where I need it most. --- Oh, I guess I could check it out, huh!

Hey, Joan - I discovered XP's Image Resizer many years ago courtesy of a home inspector in Kentucky, but I sure have missed it the last few months working on this Vista computer. It wasn't critical with my old digital camera doing home inspections work, but wanting professional quality with my Canon Rebel XSi is a different story. A single high quality picture can be as much as 15,000 MB. That's huge. I want to save most of the pictures at professional quality, but not at that size.

Hey, Nancy - I didn't like IrfanView when I tried it several years ago, so I didn't give it a chance during this latest round. Maybe it's better now.

Hey, Marchel - I see you caught the Tom Hanks "Big" reference. My old Photoshop 5.5 works with Vista, which made me happy. I only had one problem with Vista, with an old scanner, but downloading new Vista drivers solved that problem quickly.

Hey, Brian - I had tried emailing a couple of times but just found it too cumbersome. Maybe because I'm still using AOL? LOL

Hey, Maria - That's what I had heard, which is why I delayed so long before buying a Vista computer. However, I have not found that to be true.

Hey, Andrew - I've never used photos in my home inspection that are more than 640x480 and one megapixels. Just never needed any better resolution than that. That size in the camera creates pictures that are about 150 KB, but resizing them creates 35 KB pictures. That's a significant savings in disk space when one takes 200 pictures per inspection, two inspections per day, seven days a week.

Russel - that 's great news. I have Vista and it has started to slow down I have been manually making the pics smaller, some of them I wanted to keep larger and uploaded to flickr. Then I realized I already had a 500gig external hard drive so now they are automatically imported there from the camera. ~Rita

Russel, I will be upgrading to Vista in the not too distant future and will be needing this advice. My pictures come out HUGE as you said but they told me to leave them for best resolution. I went back 2 or 4 pages to look for your post about the house so I could read it....and can't find it. I would love to see it and will check back here to see if you can post a link or send it to me? Thank you!

JUN

Great advice Russell and I have Vista and size tons of pics. <SMILE>

Hey, Carole - It's over here: http://activerain.com/blogsview/1106212/the-house-i-want-to-inspect-but-i-m-not-qualified

Hi Russel,

Thanks for sharing this great info...it's been bookmarked.

JUN

Thank you for this tip. I've been using Picnik, but it can be unwieldy to have to upload make changes, save, etc.

JUN

thank you so much. I have adobe photoshop and I hate it.

Free is good. I have photoshop on my desktop, but my laptop has cheapware! This may indeed come in handy if I have to do some shrinking quick. Thanks for sharing.

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