PC help: Shrink file sizes

Q Can you tell me how to zip my photos so I am able to send them by email?

At the moment my pictures are too large, but I wish to send them using my Googlemail if possible. I am using a Fujifilm Finepix camera and use the Finepix Viewer software for looking at the photos.
Frank Thomas

A Zipping or compressing files makes them smaller and easier to email or put on the web. Special software is required both for creating zip files and for extracting the original files from the zip files.

Fortunately, since Windows XP, this ability has been built into the operating system. To use it, open the folder in which your pictures are stored – this is usually My Pictures, and you can get to it from the Start menu. Find the pictures you want to send – it might be a group, or a single picture, or you can compress an entire folder. Next right-click the picture(s) and select Send To, then choose ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’. Follow any prompts that appear, and a new file will show up in the same folder. This is the zip file, which can be attached to an email in the usual way.

Unfortunately, as digital camera images have already been compressed, they may not end up much smaller than they were to begin with. As an alternative to email, you might want to consider using a web service. Email isn’t designed for file sharing, and big attachments, such as pictures, can take a long time to send and receive. So you can put pictures online, where other people can view them using a web browser. Good photo-sharing websites are Flickr and Picassa – both include instructions for how to create an account, upload your images and let other people know about them.