It's important to remember that images uploaded for the web actually need to be resized – often an image from the camera will be something like 1.5 – 5mb – which can take up to a minute to download when viewing a web page. If you put these images on a webpage at full size, the browser will often shrink them so you can't see them at full size, which makes it very hard to see what's going on.
You can see image sizes using right click and Properties in both Internet Explorer (Right Click Properties) and Firefox (Right-click View Image Info). In Chrome, the easiest way to see an image size is to install an Extension to View Image Properties – there are quite a few options there (I used this one).
The old Windows XP powertoy resizer allowed you to right click on an image and resize it very quickly and easily, if you needed smaller size images for the web. Unfortunately it no longer works on Windows 7. However, the powertoy has been rewritten for Windows 7 and made publicly available.
Resizing the easy way …
To resize images the easy way, you simply:
- Download and install the resizer program first from http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/
- right click the image in your Windows folder,
- choose Resize Image
- select Medium or Small, or choose a specific size if you need one
If you still have XP, you may like the Windows PowerToy which you can find by Googling for "Windows PowerToy Resizer".
More options with the powerful Gimp tool …
Alternatively, you may want to use the much more powerful (and more complex) free software "Gimp" which is described in Haleemon's article at Resizing images for your website.
You can install this very easily using the installation system at www.ninite.com – tick "Gimp" then click the green download button and follow prompts from there!