How to Shrink Pictures

The easiest way I know to resize a picture is to right-click it and choose Send To | Mail Recipient. This shrinks the picture down and puts it in an e-mail. I can then save the smaller picture and delete the e-mail. One day I found a dialog box in Outlook that let me pick small, medium or large for the size of a picture, but I can't seem to find it again. Do you have any ideas on how to shrink pictures without putting them in an e-mail first?

Steven Feinman

If what you really want to do is send pictures in an e-mail, Outlook's Send Pictures via E-Mail wizard is quite handy (see www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/ digitalphotography/getstarted/e-mail.mspx for details). But if all you want is a smaller picture, there are better tools. If you're using Office 2003, right-click the picture and choose Open With, then choose Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Click the Edit Pictures button and a pane will open. At the bottom of the pane you'll see Change picture size with two choices beneath: Resize and Compress Pictures. Both give you several options for creating smaller pictures.

If you have an earlier version of Office you can use the Windows Paint accessory to resize a picture. Right-click the picture and choose Open. Unless you have another image-editing program installed, the picture will open in Paint. Select Attributes from the Image menu to see what the current width and height of the image are. Calculate what percentage of that size you want the reduced image to be. For example, if it's 1600-by-1200 and you want something 400 pixels wide, you'll reduce it to 25 percent of its current size. Now select Stretch/ Skew from the Image menu and enter the desired percentage in the Horizontal and Vertical boxes within the Stretch pane. When you click OK, the image will be resized. Now select Save As from the File menu and save the new, reduced image under a different name.

Another solution that won't cost you any money is to download Google's free Picasa 2 image manager ( www.picasa.com ), a PC Magazine Editors' Choice ( http://go.pcmag.com/picasa2). Picasa lets you select all the files you want to resize en masse and then shrink them by selecting File | Export Pictures to Folder. Make sure Resize to is selected and use the slider or enter the maximum number of pixels that you want in the largest dimension.