Habitually Good

I regularly need to resize pictures that I have for various reasons (sending emails, embedding into documents, embedding into blog posts, etc.). This usually requires opening up some image editing software to resize the images. This can get painful if there are multiple pictures to resize (suppose I had to share pictures I took from my high megapixel camera and now i need to email them).

While there are software which will batch resize your images for you, here’s a quick and dirty way to do it from within windows itself. We use the built-in Windows XP utility to do this. Here’s how:

Open up explorer and navigate to the location where your images that you want to resize are stored.

Select all the images that you want to resize. Once you do this, you will notice that a few more options are available on the Task Pane to the left.

Click on “E-mail the selected items” task in the task pane.

When you click on this, you are presented with options that allow you to choose if you want to email the original sizes or if you want to reduce the sizes of the images. Here you can click on a link that says “Show more options…“. When you click here you can see various sizes available to which you can resize your images:

As you can see, there are 3 options for 3 popular sizes. Choose the one you like and click OK.

When you click OK, Windows will then open your email program with the images as attachments. Notice the size of the attachments (the size has been reduced).

Now it’s a simple matter of saving the attachments to the disk. This can be done in many ways (depending on your email program, you can go to the File Menu and choose Save Attachments). The simplest way is to select all the attachments and copy them, and then you can paste them at whatever location you choose:

Notice the total size of the images now. It’s a fraction of what the original images were.

The good thing about the technique is that the resizing will preserve the aspect ratio. This means that the images will not distort.

And if you were going to email the images you can do it right away.

I have tried this with Windows XP, and am not sure if it works with Windows Vista. If anyone can make it work with Windows Vista, then please leave a comment saying so.

Oh also, once you are done. Simply close the email window (and don’t save the message when prompted).

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