3 FREE Ways to Format Pics for Our Forums (or email!)

You may have something already …
Some installations of Windows XP have a “Make Thumbnail” option on the “context menu” that pops up when you right click on a picture file. So try that … but if its not there, don’t dispair, we have two free solutions that will work for you.

Google’s Free Picasa Software

Google’s free Picasa software is really a total photo solution,and its free. It starts by Google’s free Picasa software is really a total photo solution, and its free. It starts by indexing all the pictures in the folders on your computer. There are a lot of features for enhancing photos, categorizing them, etc.

This really is a great program that I think stands up well against all the commercial photo organizing programs that run $50 or more at the computer store. But right now, we’re just concerned with making a smaller copy of a photo for upload.

Well, it couldn’t be easier. Just select the photo in Picasa and click the “Export” button along the bottom of the screen, and you get the following dialog box:

Tell Picasa where to store the new picture, select the “Resize to” radio button and slide the size slider to any of the smaller values from 320 to about 500 pixels. For forum or email use, you can also reduce the picture size quite a bit by adjusting the “Image Quality” slider to about 50%, if the format of the picture you’re making allows it.

Cool. And its completely free.

Most commercial and some other free photo editing programs have similar capability, so check and see if you already have a solution.  Otherwise, check out Picasa at Google.

EZ Thumbs Software
Another great program that’s also free is simply a “thumbnail” maker. It won’t let you lighten a dark picture, crop and rotate, organize all your pics, etc., but it excels at making copies of pics any size you like. And did we mention its free? If you’re a minimalist kind of person and don’t want a full featured program, get EZ Thumbs from Fookes Software.

Configure it for an image about 400 pixels wide, and you should be set.  It has an option to insert itself into the right-click menu on a Windows machine, so you simply right click on an image file, select “Open with” EZ Thumbs, and you have a properly proportioned copy of your image.  EZ Thumbs pre-pends “tn_” to the name of your original for the smaller copy.