Have you ever ran upstairs to your computer, offloaded a bunch of photo’s from your new digital camera with the intention to email them off to all your friends when you find out the file size is way to big? With all the new and latest digital cameras becoming more and more affordable people are taking photos in over 10 Mega Pixel, when in reality 1 Mega Pixel would be just fine. Most people use photos at on average in the 3X5 size, some 5X7, and in rare cases maybe a little bigger. This problem is most people associate more mega pixels as a better photo, what it really means is a bigger photo. If you look at the size of your screen, your entire monitor for most people 1024X768, that is less than 1 mega pixel! How many pictures do you have around your house that size?

The Problem
The problem comes in when people are taking photos at 10 mega pixel, simply because their camera sets that as their default, partly because yes that is what they can do, partly so they can sell more memory cards, and partly because well, we have no idea. The file size goes from well under 1MB to 10 or more per picture. Once pictures are this large there isn’t much you can do with them, they are too big to email, you can fit very few of them on memory sticks, and uploading them to say to the Walgreen’s website for processing could take all night. What you have to do is size them down in a way where they don’t lose quality, but become a size that is way more workable.

The Solution:
Changing the image size is actually quite easy, and quite free. You can turn a photo from 5 MB down to just a few K and not even notice the difference. The size down would allow you to email 20 or more photos on most email platforms unlike before where you could email a single one.
To do this you will need to complete just a few steps.

1.Download IrfanView (its free)
2.Install the Program
3. Select The Photo’s You Wish To Resize
4.Create A Folder On Your Desktop to Put The New Images
5.Open Irfanview & Open The Selected PhotoGraph
6.Select The Image Option From The Top Then The Resize/Resample Option
7.Select The New Size Of The Image, something like 640X480 should be just fine for 3X5 photos
8.Save the new image to your specified folder

Keep in mind, if you have a small photo that you wish to make big there is a limit to what you can do without making the image look distorted or grainy. When you are started with a really high quality image you have more options, you’re able to make it as small as you see fit.

The reason you store it in two different folders is so you don’t overwrite the original, as for the resized images those you can delete when you’re done with them. Also remember you cant really resize a resized image, always work from the original.

Here Are A Few Screen Shots

Here are your options to re size the image how you like: