Resizing Photos with Paint

27th May 2009

We have made a newer article on resizing, Emailing a Photo if you would like to try that one first.

With digital cameras nowdays you get high quality photos. If you then want to upload these photos to your website the quality can cause you problems. For use on a website, so it loads quickly for your clients and so you can upload it easily, we need the photo to be about 0.1 to 0.2MB (100-200KB). Commonly photos come out of the camera at 2 to 10MB (2000-10000KB). This is a significant reduction we need to do. To achieve this we need some photo software to resize it. I will explain how to do it using MicroSoft Paint, a product that comes free with every Windows OS. You can also do it in any photo software, like Photoshop or Gimp, if you are comfortable with this. The objective its to get the photo to about 100-200 KB, I find getting it down to 600 pixels * 450 pixels normally works for me.

Find the photo you want to upload to your website
Right click on the photo -> select open with -> select Paint
In the top menu you will see a button labelled Image
Click this and then click Resize/Skew
In the Resize section change the Horizontal to 20% and the Vertical to 20%
Next click File in the top menu -> Save as
Now give the photo a good name, if it is a photo of your business then name the photo "Business Name Armidale" or something like that.
Save it in a location you will remember, now it is ready to upload to your website.

Always click Save as and save the resized photo to as different location or just a different name. This means you always keep the high resolution photo you got from the camera.

If you find the 20% you used in Paint doesnt work for you, try different amounts, maybe 10% or 50%. You will find a method that works for you.

Well done. You can also use this to email friends photos. This will make the photos you send them smaller, easier to download and to see. Good Luck.