How to resize large digital pictures so that you can email them to friends and family!

Posted on March 11, 2007 at 9:15 pm

Now that you can buy a 5 MP digital camera off eBay for $130 or less, it’s become a lot more common to see your digital pictures grow in size from anywhere between 1MB and 4MB!!! And so it’s become a lot harder to try to email these photos or upload them due to the limitations on the size of attachments or simply the fact that it takes a long time to upload 10 pictures that are 2MB a piece in size! So I’m going to talk about two methods to send your digital pictures in a speedy and easy way!

1. Windows XP has a built-in feature that will take your photos and automatically re-size them to a manageable size and then attach them to an email in your default email program. Using this method you need to have Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail as your email program because it uses the setting from Internet Explorer’s default for email programs and that list only has these three options. If you don’t use any of those for your email, there is another way to re-size the files, but that requires downloading and installing a free application, so we’ll talk about that later.

The first step is to go to the folder that your pictures and select the photos that you would like to send. Once selected, you will see an option on the left hand menu called "Email this file or "Email the selected files".

Once you click this, you will be prompted with another dialog box that asks you whether you want to make the images smaller or if you want to keep them the same size. Go ahead and choose "Make all my pictures smaller".

Click ok and Windows will re-size all the images and open a new email with your default email program with the pictures attached!

Now if you’re one of the people who does not use any of the above three listed programs for your email, this will not work! So the work around is to download the Windows Power Toys which has an application to re-size photos not linked with any email program. Download the Power Toys from the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

You can read about the other tools that are included, or if you only want the resizer application, you can scroll down and on the right hand side of the page you will see the links for all the applications listed individually. Download the Image Resizer application and install it onto your system. It’s a very small application, so it should only take a minute or two.

Once you have it installed, go to the folder with your files, select them, right click on one of the selected images and you’ll see a new menu option called "Resize Pictures".

When you click on this, you will get a similar screen to the previous one where you can select the size from small to large. I would go with small since this is usually large enough to display nicely on a computer screen. Click OK and your file is created in the same directory as your original file, but with a "(Small)" appended to the name.

Now all you have to do is go to your email program and attach the smaller files to your email!

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One Response to “How to resize large digital pictures so that you can email them to friends and family!”

How to send large files to friends, family, and co-workers when email doesn’t work Says:

[...] my RSS feed to get daily tips. Thanks for visiting!In a previous post, I talked about how you can email large digital pictures to other people by using the built-in windows email feature or shrinking the pictures using an XP PowerToy. [...]
October 10th, 2007 at 11:29 pm