Easy Options for Resizing Photos

If you are having trouble making your photos small enough to upload to your website or blog, there are 3 easy options you can try…

Images and WordPress

One of the great things about using WordPress is that you can upload individual photos to a post or multiple photos to a gallery (using the Next Generation Gallery Plugin) quickly and easily.

However, you don’t want the photos to be too big. Firstly they will take too long to load for people to view them on your website and secondly they will take up a lot of space on your website and likely increase your monthly hosting charge.

Option 1: Batch resize using Shrink-o-matic

I have just discovered a great Adobe program which shrinks your photos to a desired size and renames them automatically. You can shrink entire folders of photos at once (great for uploading photo galleries to your website or emailing all your holiday snaps to friends).

1. Download the Adobe AIR application to your computer.
2. Download the “>Shrink-o-matic program by clicking on Install Now.
3. Setup both programs by double-clicking on the desktop setup files.

1. To resize photos, open Shrink-o-matic (from Program files or desktop shortcut).
2. Change settings to similar to screenshot above. (Under Output Name, select auto rename, if you don’t specify an output folder they will save in the same folders as the originals).
3. Open the folder of photos you want to resize.
4. Highlight the image files and drag into the shrink-o-matic box.
5. Wait until ‘Done’ appears in the yellow box.

Option 2: Downsize Your Digital Camera Settings

One option to make life easier for yourself is to change the settings on your digital camera so that your photos are only small to begin with and you cab upload them directly to your website without resizing. The problem with this is that if you want to use one of those photos for an ad or brochure it will be too small and wont print clearly.

Option 3: Use Paintshop

Most PCs have a program called Paint installed on them by default.

1. Go to Programs/Accessories
2. Open Paint
3. Go to File/Open and find the photo you want to resize
4. Go to Image, then Stretch/Skew
5. Decrease the percentage values until the photo looks how you want it to on screen.
6. Make sure both percentages are the same or your photo will end up distorted.
7. Click OK
8. Go to File/Save As and add the word ‘small’ to the end of your file name(this means you still keep the original and will know which small pic belongs to where).
9. Save your file.