How to optimize your pictures for the web

The challenge
One challenge for non-technical users (and even some of us technical users) is how to resize the extremely large picture files produced by today's 8+ megapixel digital cameras. The pictures taken with these cameras can easily be upwards of 3 megabytes in size, which makes them difficult to upload to online services.

Windows XP
Windows XP has an excellent utility for quickly resizing a batch of images made by Microsoft called Image Resizer Powertoy. It's a cinch to install and adds a context menu option to resize images by simply right-clicking in Windows Explorer. However, this PowerToy only works on Windows XP.

Windows Vista
Under Vista, there are two easy choices to go with.
The easiest way to generate a smaller, resized image is using Windows Photo Gallery that comes with Vista.

1. Double-click image to open in default Vista image viewer (Windows Photo Gallery)
2. Click the "E-mail" toolbar icon.
3. Pick a size and click OK.



You don't even have to send the email to yourself (although you can if you want). Just right click the attachment in the new email and choose "Save As." Poof! Now you have a smaller version of the large image, and you didn't even have to open Photoshop, or worse, Microsoft Paint.



If you like the idea of the Image Resizer utility that exists as a Powertoy in Windows XP, there's an alternative for Windows Vista made by VSO Software called VSO Image Resizer. It works almost exactly like the Image Resizer PowerToy. Select one or more images in Windows Explorer and right-click. A simple UI is shown to set a few options before resizing. The default options should work fine for most people. There are also advance options for renaming, image optimization, etc.



Conclusion
Choose what best matches your taste and have fun optimizing and resizing your pictures for the web! :beer