Free Tools for

Picture Resize Needs

Easily Resize Your Photos, Images, Pictures

With computers we accumulate pictures of all sizes and routinely need to resize these pictures to fit a screen or a particular format requirement.

When I take photos with my digital camera, I always take the photos with the maximum resolution. And why not? I buy 1GB or larger SD disks cheap on buy.com. Besides, you never know when you will end up with a gem and want an enlargement to 8 x 11.

But if I want to post that picture on a website or submit it with an article I have written, it just cannot be that large. It needs to be resized to fit the requirements.

There are actually several free tools to resize photos and images of all kinds, each with advantages and disadvantages. I will cover a few of those picture resizers here.

Windows XP Powertoy - Image Resizer

The PowerToys available for Windows XP include a "toy" that allows you to right click any image, select resize, then choose from different screen resolutions to match the image to.

For me, this falls into the category of easy, simple, but crude. Normally, my picture resizing needs are a little more complex than that.

VSO Image Resizer

• Convert between different graphic formats
• Configurable compression/resolution ratio
• Support file formats: Jpeg, gif, bmp, tiff etc
• Support Digital Camera RAW formats: Canon .CR2, Nikon .NEF , .MRW Minolta
• Handle single picture or batch mode
• Customizable templates for renaming files
• You can add your own watermark file

GIMP it

Another free program you might see talked about is GIMP. This is an open source program that is supposed to be a lot like PhotoShop. Unfortunately, it is one of those programs where you have to install a supporting framework program, which I tend to dislike. (Kind of like having to install a 100 megabytes or so of Microsoft Dot Net garbage.)

I once installed and opened GIMP, it didn't seem terribly intuitive and probably did more than I needed at the time, so I uninstalled. I mention it in case you are looking for some more functionality than VSO Image Resizer might offer.

Since we are on the topic of Photos...