How to Shrink Photos - A New Simple and Easy Program to Resize Pictures

Digital cameras are dropping in price or to look at it another way, for the same amount of money you get more mega pixels.

However, as the number of mega pixels increases so does the size of each picture - in width/height and in kilobytes and the bigger the file size the longer it takes to transmit and receive over the Internet when attached to emails.

There is little point in sending someone a huge photo. Most of you reading this will have your monitor set to 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. A 10 mega pixel camera can take pictures 3648 pixels wide by 2736 pixels high. So just look at your monitor and visualise three screens wide by three screens high! What is the point of sending someone a picture that big where they have to scroll the screen to find a face! And it took half an hour to download the email!

 The answer is to shrink the photo before sending it.

There are many great and powerful programs out there which can do amazing things with graphics but with power comes complexity. Some of the programs bundled with your camera are very good but some are quite confusing to use. I recommend a simple alternative.

 Primitive Photo Resizer

This free, small (650kb) program can be downloaded from the author at PrimitiveZone [http://www.primitivezone.com/primitive-photo-resizer.html] and supports JPG, GIF and BMP file formats - the most popular formats. There is no installation procedure as the program stands alone on your desktop or folder.

 To Use Primitive Photo Resizer

Double left click the icon and the program loads in a flash and says 'No Photo Available' which is fair enough as you haven't loaded one yet.

Click on 'Open' and navigate to where your photos reside. If your camera is connected it will show as a removable drive and each photo will show as a file with a number within a folder.

Click on the photo and it will load into Primitive Photo Resizer.

Resize by dragging a right or bottom side or the bottom right corner up and left. The picture will stay in the same ratio of width to height.
Once you are satisfied with the size click on 'Save' and navigate to the folder where you want to store your photos and also give the photo a name that means something to you. Click 'Save' and go onto the next photo.

 Job done!

If you care to use Windows Explorer you can see that the original photo could have been 2 Mb to 80Mb in size but has been reduced to at least a tenth of the size.