Most cameras and video recorders nowadays take huge pictures, along the lines of 10 megapixels or more. Since most e-mail programs don’t allow you to send attachments that big, sending them to friends and relations becomes a big problem.
To alleviate the issue, one could download a big, expense program like Photoshop and use its shrink to web feature, or you can play it smart, and do your shrinking for free. There are two way to shrink your images, one would be to download and learn a photo editing program like GIMP, or the other would be to skip the time, wasted space, and headache of learning a program, and let Windows Outlook do it for you.
This works in both Windows XP and Vista, and I presume it will work on Windows 7 as well.
- Move the image you want to compress into your My Pictures folder. My Pictures is located in My Documents.
- Click on the image(s) you want to compress so they are highlighted.
- When you do so, on the left hand side of the folder window, some new menu options will appear.
- Under File and Folder Tasks click on Email this file.
- By this time, a box should have appeared, asking if you want to make the pictures smaller, or keep the original size. Select Show more options to set the picture size.
- Microsoft Outlook will open. If you have never used Outlook before, a wizard will appear and walk you through setting up outlook.
- I do not recommend using Outlook as an e-mail client, since it is fairly buggy, besides, we will not be sending the email out anyway.
- You will notice that in the window that pops up, there will be an email form, and under attachments, you will see your image, greatly reduced in size.
- Click File then go down to Save attachments.
- The attachment will be saved to your My Documents, hence why we moved the original picture to My Pictures. Getting overwritten files is not fun.
- Go ahead and close Outlook. Do not save.
- Enjoy your new compressed picture!
Well, there you go, a way to use the built in power of Microsoft Windows to compress images.
Got any cool tips? Please share them with me!
Your GIMP link is broken. The correct URL is http://www.gimp.org
This may be a dumb question, but since you are in windows, why not just use MS Paint? It has a resizing function.
I had no idea MS Paint had a resizing feature. I looked and could not find it, so if you would be so kind, could you please tell me where it is?
If you are in XP, you can use the “Stretch/Skew” tool in the “Image” drop-down menu, and if you are using windows 7, the resize tool has an icon in the main part of the ribbon.
I had no idea. Awesome!
Hi,
you have the excellent image magick on unix environment, it’s command line and excellent. You can script it to apply to a whole directory ! And last time I checked, there was a windows version…
You can resize and convert, and do a lot of many other things !!!!
A great software, you can check http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php