Easy Way to Resize Your Digital Photos in Windows XP

 I remember my first digital camera - that was almost 10 years ago - it had a whopping 1 megapixel capacity and cost about $600!  Todays digital cameras boast anywhere from 5-10 megapixels or more and you can get a really nice one in the $200-$300 range.  I don't remember the last time I actually saw anyone using a 35mm camera.

With the higher megapixels and high capacity memeory cards comes bigger file sizes, which in turn produces excellent prints.  However, you might be frowned upon for emailing these large files to friends and family or uploading them to a website.

I found a great free tool for Windows XP users that makes resizing your digitial photos a snap without using complicated photo editing software.

Power Toys are free tools that software developers create after a product has been released. There are several available on Microsoft's Website.

I'm going to show you how to install and use the Image Resizer. Visit the Power Toys for Windows XP website. As of this writing, you'll see a list of downloads listed on the right side of the page.

Scroll down until you see the Image Resizer download.  Click on the link and click 'Run' when prompted.  SImply follow the on-screen instructions to install.  It literally takes about 2 minutes to download and intstall this useful tool!

 Once Image Resizer is installed, you can literally resize your digital photos with the click of a mouse from Windows Explorer. 

Another nice feature of Image Resizer is that it creates a duplicate of your photo and resizes the duplicate so there is no need to backup your original photo first.  Of course you should always have backups of your photos and important data - but I'll save that for another hub!

I've created screen shots of actually resizing a photo so you can see how simple it really is.

If you have several photos in sequence to resize, simply click the first photo then hold down the shift key and click on the last photo. All of the photos in between will be selected. Then follow the steps above to resize all of them at once.

If there are several non-sequential photos you need to resize, click on one photo, hold down the ctrl key while clicking the other photos you need to resize. Once you have them all selected, resize them using the above steps.

 Unfortunately, Power Toys are not available for Windows Vista at this time.  However, there is a free download called Windows Live Photo Gallery that has a resize tool you can use much the same way as the Image Resizer.  Photo Gallery is a free tool that you can use to organize, edit and share photos. 

Windows Photo Gallery is compatible with both Windows XP and Windows Vista.