How to Shrink Your Photos

When you take a photograph using your digital camera, webcam or even your cell phone, it is often too large to share with your friends and family on image-sharing sites or to print out. It may be necessary to resize the image to smaller proportions to share. There are free alternatives to commercial software that you can use on any operating system whether you're using Microsoft Windows, Linux or a Macintosh.

Instructions

Microsoft Paint

1. Open Microsoft Paint and click "Open." Navigate to the photo you want to shrink and click "Open."

2. Click the "Home" tab and select "Resize." Check "Maintain aspect ratio" if you do not want the image dimensions to become skewed. Choose whether you want to resize by percentage or by pixels.

3. Enter the percentage of the original image to which you want to resize the photo, or enter a pixel size for either the horizontal or vertical dimension. If you checked "Maintain aspect ratio," the second dimension will automatically adjust when you adjust the first dimension.

4. Click the "Paint" button in the upper right corner and select "Save As." Type your new file name in the box and select "Save."

Gimp

1. Open Gimp then select "File" and "Open." Navigate to where your saved image is located.

2. Right-click on the image and select "Image" from the menu. Click "Scale Image" from the options.

3. Type the width or height you want for your new image. The other attribute will adjust to keep the aspect ratio. If you do not want to maintain the aspect ratio, click the "Chain" icon located next to the ratio option.

4. Click "OK" to shrink your image. Click "File" and select "Save As." Type the name for your new image and click "Save."

Picasa

1. Open Picasa and select the image you want to resize from the left menu, which displays a listing of the folders you currently have on disk.

2. Click "File" and choose "Export Picture to Folder..." Choose a location to save the new file.

3. Type the width of the new image in the "Resize to" box. Then click "OK" to create your new image.

4. Click "File" and "Save As" to save your new image. Type the file name and click "OK" to save it to disk.

References

• Microsoft: Resize a Picture Using Paint
• Novell; Gimp Tips Part 1: Resizing Images; Jason Jones; February 2005
• Picasa and Picasa Web Albums Help: From Picasa: Resize photos