Resizing Digital Photos for E-mail in Windows XP

Once in a while I will get several digital photos as attachments in an e-mail, and the photos haven’t been resized. This is a problem as photos from a digital camera are usually 2MB and larger, which is quite big to send in an e-mail. Add to the fact that there are usually several photos being sent in an e-mail, and you can see that it can take some time to download the entire e-mail.

In this post I will show you a quick method of resizing your photos right in Windows XP that will make them ready for e-mailing or uploading to the Web.

The Image Resizer Powertoy

Before we begin, you will need to download the Image Resizer Powertoy from the Microsoft Web site. These steps only need to be done once.

1. Download Image Resizer Powertoy from the Microsoft Web site. The link is listed on the right.
2. Install the Image Resize by following the prompts.

Resizing the Photos

Use the following steps to be able to easily resize photos in Windows XP:

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the directory containing the photos you want to resize.
2. Select all the photos you want to resize and right-click the highlighted files and select Resize Pictures from the context menu.
3. From the Resize Pictures window, ensure Small is selected and click OK.

4. The tool will now resize your pictures and save the smaller copy in the same directory with a similar name to the original. The only difference is that the new file names now include (Small) in the file name.
5. You can now attach the resized files in an e-mail.

Another Method of Resizing Photos

There is a second method of resizing photos in Windows XP. This method doesn’t involve any additional tools, but simply creates an e-mail with the smaller files already attached.

1. Similar to the previous method, open Windows Explorer and navigate to the directory containing the photos you want to resize.
2. Select all the photos you want to resize and then right-click the highlighted files.
3. From the menu, select Sent To and then Mail Recipient.
4. Ensure Make all my pictures smaller is selected and click OK.

5. You pictures should now be resized, and automatically attached to an e-mail.

The once difference between the first and second method is the resized file types. In the first method the file types of the files are the same, while the second method converts them to JPEG. This means that if you resize a TIFF file, the first method will resize and save the picture as a TIFF, while the second method would convert it to a JPEG.

For more information on various image formats, please read Overview of Various Image File Formats.

Summary

In this post I have provided a link to a simple image resizer tool from Microsoft that allows you to easily resize pictures directly from Windows Explorer. I also provided two different methods of resizing images that you send via e-mail or upload to a Web site.