Resize Photos or Images: It's Not Just Size that Matters

You have just taken your digital photos, now you need to convert them to be just the right size. Whatever your purpose is – you may want wallpaper for your phone, you may be a budding webmaster, you need to send some photos through email to your family or friends – you need to resize your photos.

This article will discuss the key details you need to know. It will discuss sizing, cropping, and compressing. Fortunately, one of today’s tools makes this possible. We present you Bulk Photo Resizer, an excellent Swiss Army Knife for your photos. This software does more than resize.

It’s not necessary that you know what size your photos are; what’s important is that you know what size you want them to be. Of course it helps to set your camera for the right size (the setting might be called “resolution”). If you know how to do that, your camera to take bigger, clearer photos; however, they will eat up memory faster than smaller ones. You don't have to make a choice between two extremes, though. If you want to take a lot of photos and still want acceptable quality, then you can go for medium resolution.

Most cameras have a setting like medium resolution. If there’s no such setting, something around 600 pixels wide gives you a size that is acceptable, unless you want an incredibly artistic photo that you'll want as big as possible.

Camera manuals have additional specific tips on resolution or image quality settings. Whatever your camera is, whether it’s a cell phone camera, a web cam, or a regular digital camera, or you scanned some photographs from your family album, there are some settings to configure. Cameras come with default factory settings that are good for general usage. This setting will allow you to get acceptable image qualities without knowing all the tricks from the manual.

Now, let's get back to the photos that are already saved in your hard drive. If the photos are too big for the application you need them for, you can easily resize them with the Bulk Photo Resizer, an easy to use software you can download and try out for free.

The question is: what size is the right size? For attaching photos to email, a conservative size is about 400 pixels wide. For use in social networking or dating sites, you will want to check on the resolution they prefer.  Resizing the photo to the sites required or preferred dimensions will give you the best-looking result. After clicking on a thumbnail (the smaller image), you see the larger image which is usually around 300 pixels wide, although this varies. Finally, if you’re creating wallpaper or an image for your screen saver, you need to consider your monitor’s resolution, unless you just want to let Windows stretch the image. The resolution would not be quite that good if you do this.

Whatever size you decide on choosing, you'll need to do a lot of the following three things: crop, resize, and compress. Our featured program, Bulk Photo Resizer does all these three easily. The user interface is very simple; using the software is very easy to learn. Use it for one photo at a time, or use it on hundreds or even thousands of photos all at once. Our software testers found it nearly impossible to make mistakes. The software even prevents you from stretching the photo too tall or wide keeping everything the right shape. This is called “preserving the aspect ratio.” The resizing choices Bulk Photo Resizer gives you are already preset to ensure that the aspect ratio is preserved.

One thing that is almost as bad as stretching your photo out of shape is enlarging it. If your photo is not large enough, it's best to leave it at its resolution. Bulk Photo Resizer prevents you from enlarging the photo. If you want larger photos from you camera, you need to learn how to set it for higher resolution photos.

Why does Bulk Photo Resizer prevent enlarging? When digital photos are enlarged, they start to get jagged edges known as the “jaggies”, which are the little squares that make up the image. If a photo gets too big, it starts to look like what they do on TV to hide someone's face or license plate, turning it into little squares. This effect is called pixelation.

Great news! There’s no problem if you don't know what the size of your photo is, Bulk Photo Resizer will tell you!

If you need to know what the size of your photo is and you don't have software similar to Bulk Photo Resizer, you can check the photo on your computer using a Windows program called Windows Explorer. Windows explorer will help you find where your files are. First, you need find the directory that has your photos. Thumbnail view will be very helpful in finding photos. To switch to Thumbnail View, just click View (in the menu row near the top of the screen), and then select Thumbnails. Windows explorer helps you figure out what directory to look in by showing you some of the images in each directory when you are in thumbnail view.

After you find your photo, right click on its thumbnail or file name, then select Properties, and click on the Summary tab. This tab will show you the height and width of your photo in pixels.

Before resizing your photo, you should consider cropping. Cropping a photo simply means you are trimming away the parts around the outside edge so that you can have the things in the photo positioned and featured the way you want. Look at some photos in a magazine, or observe how things look in movie scenes. You will notice that the important parts of the photo stand out. They aren't surrounded by too much of the scenery or background, unless there's a good reason to show it. Never show someone from the chest up and then have several inches of sky overhead as though his head was a bulls-eye. Have his head shown at the top of the photo.

The Bulk Photo Resizer software makes it very easy to crop any image. You will actually see right away how it will look. It’s also very easy to undo things and try over.

After cropping an image, it will have a smaller size. You can now check the size of your photo so that you can decide if it needs to be even smaller for your purposes. Don't be too eager to click that save command. When cropping an image, you might want to save it as a different file just in case you change your mind and would want to revert to the original image. This advice applies to images that you resize as well. You may just need that image in its original size later?

When saving an image, you will need to decide on how much compression to use. Compressing an image means making it take up less space on your hard drive. The problem with compression, however, is that you lose image quality. If you go too far in compressing, your photo can look downright blotchy. If you will be doing more editing to an image, you need to save it with no compression.

If you are saving an image in its final form, then some compression is usually recommended, especially for the web. If you intend to show an image on the web, you want it to be shown on visitors' browsers as quickly as possible. Social networking and dating sites have rules about how many kilobytes an image can be as well. If they say an image has to be less than 100 KB, then check to see if your image needs to be compressed or made smaller. Either of these actions (cropping / compression) will make the file size smaller. Image size and file size confuses a lot of people. Image size is how big an image looks while file size is how much space it takes up on your hard drive. Larger file sizes take more time to show up on a webpage because a visitor needs to download more data in their browser when they go to the page.

With Bulk Photo Resizer, compressing images is very easy. If you want compression to be not that obvious, use 80. Compression scale goes from zero to 100. 60 is a considerably high level of compression since the image starts to be noticeably blotchy at this setting. There should be no noticeable effect of compression at a setting of 90 or higher, although it will still reduce the file size a good bit.

As a side note, the kind of image file or file type that is compressed is usually those that end in .jpg. People usually call these file types “jay-pegs,” but no one spells it that way.  A great majority of photos or images on the web are in .jpg's format.

There are a lot more facts you can learn about digital photos, but now you know the most essential stuff. We hope you enjoy resizing, cropping and compressing your photos!