Resizing Photographs for your website

Added on: Thursday 5th February 2009

Most modern digital cameras nowadays have very high resolutions which means that the photos are larger than most computer screens let alone web pages.

Even when displaying larger pop up images from a thumbnail in a photo gallery you only need a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels - unless perhaps you are selling photographs online in which case you should have some sort of watermark to prevent downloading.

Although many website content management systems allow you to resize images via the administration area, you still have to upload the file first and with typical sizes of 3+MB this may take some time.

Try to upload half a dozen or so together and you'll probably be timed out or be told you've exceeded the maximum file size.

There are lots of tools around that can be used to resize images on your PC but most of these come with a huge number of options to rename the resized images, save or overwrite the original etc.

Here is a little used way to easily resize a group of photos in Windows without any additional software. The method below describes how to do this in Windows XP but Vista will be similar.

Firstly, go to the folder with the photos in and select the ones you want to resize. Once the selection is complete click the right mouse button on one of the photos and select Send To > and then Mail Recipient.

A window will then pop up options to make the photos smaller or keep at the original size. The Make all my pictures smaller option is selected by default.

If you click the Show more options... link at the bottom of the window you will see a list of three sizes - Small, Medium or Large. Small is the default but Medium is also OK for websites.

Select the size and click OK. This then generates a new email message with the photos as attachments.

At this stage there is no need to send the email (although you can of course use this option for sending to other people) but you can simply select File > Save Attachments... from the menu in your email software.

Select a new folder to put them in and you now have a set of photos resized ready for your website.

So, how do you get them on to your website? Well thats the subject of another posting but our content management system has a secret weapon that makes this very easy!

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