Formatting Pics for Forums

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EZ Thumbs from Fookes Software

Formatting pictures for upload into our forums or to send to your friends via email is quite a bit different from printing pictures out to pass around. When printing, you want to use a high quality image, but you can't use that on a monitor. The reason: monitors typically use less than 100 DPI ("dots per inch") while a picture for printing can use 1200 DPI or more.

The solution is to make a copy of the picture in a lesser format ... 100 DPI and a maximum of 400 pixels wide. The size is also smaller, and the picture fills about 25% of the screen on most monitors. This article shows you three ways to do that with free software.

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

August 30, 2006

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
Picasa by Google 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. In the interest of fair disclosure, Google does pay messing-about.com a referral fee for anyone who downloads the software and installs it, but as always, we don't recommend what we don't actually use. Click the button below to visit Google's site and see all of Picasa's capabilities, and download it directly from them if you like what you see.

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. We like this one too (and no, we don't get a referral fee on this one ... but it is good stuff at our favorite price).

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