Freeware Friday: Image Resizer for Windows

[#1]

Let’s say you just returned from that once-in-a-lifetime African safari, and you’re browsing through your amazing photos (think leopards in trees and lions on the prowl) on your brand new HP PC. Before uploading them to Snapfish, though, you need to shrink a bunch of those photos you want to email. With just a few clicks, Image Resizer for Windows will keep you from clogging up your buddies’ – and family’s – inboxes.

Back in the XP day, Microsoft introduced some free PowerToy utilities, among them Image Resizer PowerToy for Windows XP. Unfortunately it’s Windows XP only, so the Microsoft faithful who moved into the next-gen Windows worlds of Vista and Windows 7 had to leave it behind.

Enter a bridge over troubled waters: Image Resizer for Windows, an open source freeware clone. In the words of the developer, “I created it so that modern Windows users could regain the joy they left behind with Microsoft's Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP.”

Image Resizer for Windows is great for anyone who works with images all day – whether designing web content or inserting images into documents and emails. It’s super-simple to use:

Select your photos for resizing

• To select multiple consecutive files, click the first one, hold down Shift, then click the last one.
• For multiple non-consecutive files, hold down Ctrl and click each of them.

Resize them

• Right-click on any of the selected files and choose “Resize pictures.”
• A dialog box will appear. Pick one of the default sizes, or enter your own.
• If “Only shrink pictures” is selected, any of your pictures that are smaller than the selected size will not be resized.
• You can choose to save the resized pictures as new files or over the originals.
• You have the option of putting the resized images in the same folder as the original or put in a specific folder of your choosing.

I’ve tried Image Resizer on Windows 7 (my HP EliteBook 2560p) and Vista, and it works great on both. The only nit I noticed was that on both platforms, sometimes (not always) it can take a few moments for the dialogue box to pop up after I right-click and select “Resize pictures” -- long enough for you to think it might not be working. I did notice a reference to that issue in one of the comments on the download site. Beyond that, it works like a charm, and overall the comments are good – people like it. Definitely worth a try.

(BTW, the images above are actually my photos from my favorite trip ever -- a 2006 safari in Botswana!)