Resize your pictures ready to send via email or put on a website

To shrink photo files to make them easier to handle online, we’re going to use a free program called Simple Image Resizer (SIR). When the page appears, click the ‘downloads’ link at the top, then click the download link labelled ‘Latest Release’ below the Windows Installer heading. If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and then choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. When it is finished downloading, double-click the file to launch the installer and follow the wizard’s prompts. Once installed, launch Simple Image Resizer from the Start menu.

SIR launches with some default resizing settings. These can be altered on an ad-hoc basis by simply changing the values in the various boxes and dropdown menus, such as the target image height and width (measured in pixels) or the image file format (the default is bitmap, or .bmp). To have the program start with your own preferences each time, open the Edit menu and choose Options. Make the desired changes and click OK to return to the program. To begin resizing pictures, click Add File and browse to a folder containing one or more image files. Either select an individual file and click Open or first choose several by holding down Control (Ctrl) and clicking each in turn. Click OK and SIR will show a list of selected files. More images can be added in the same way. To add an entire album of pictures, click Add Dir and browse to find and select the relevant folder, then click OK. To remove an entry from the list, click to select it, then click the Remove File(s) button; or just click Remove All to clear the list.

Now click Browse to select the target folder where the resized images will be saved. The originals won’t be changed, as SIR simply makes resized copies. By default, the target folder is set as My Documents for the current user. If in doubt, select the Windows Desktop so that they are easy to find.

Now choose the file format for the resized images – just pick the required one from the dropdown menu. For use on websites (such as a blog, for instance), images typically need to be in JPEG or GIF format. To create icon files from pictures – for use in Windows or elsewhere – select the ICO format.

If you choose to change the default image resolution (see Step 2), prevent converted images from becoming distorted by ticking the box labelled ‘Maintain Aspect Ratio’: if necessary, this overrides the user-specified height dimension to prevent the image becoming misshapen. SIR is also able to add a prefix to converted files so that they are easy to identify, which is useful if you’re saving the converted files to the same folder as the originals. The default prefix is ‘web’: to change it, click in the box and type something else.

The default value alongside Quality (‘100’) means that images will be resized without losing definition, unless the resolution is larger than the original. However, if wishing to reduce the file size, type a lower figure here – but remember that image quality will suffer (so it’s one to experiment with). To rotate pictures during conversion, tick the box labelled ‘Rotation Angle’ and type in the required number of degrees (so typing 90 will give the converted images a quarter turn). Finally, click Convert All to begin the resizing process – this could take moments or minutes, depending on the chosen settings and image quantity.