So you’ve taken some great pictures and you want to share them with the world. The possibilities are endless; you can email them to friends or put them on your website, add to a document, upload to an online photo gallery or burn them to a slide show on disk. Once you start to do one of these things you find out quickly there is a major problem, the pictures are too big and need to be resized with an image resizer but how do you do that?

The answer is simple you need to resize your reduce image size with an image resizer, now you need to learn how to resize pictures so they look good on everyone’s computer and not just yours.

This article will guide you through the basics of learning how to resize pictures easily.
Resizing Pictures involves 3 basic things, the right height, width and quality of the image, setting these three things correctly will resize the picture properly every time.

Before we continue you need to know some basic terminology:

Medium
(Plural media) are the print (newspaper, magazines, etc.) and electronic (email, website) communication devices used for sharing information.

  • Height
  • How high your image is.
  • Width
  • How wide your image is.
  • Quality

In laymen terms image quality is how much detail is in the image, the lower the quality the less detail there is, if the quality is too low then the image looks blocky, if the quality is too high then the file size grows and this really matters if you are emailing or showing the image on the web.
Quality of an image in a document printed out should always be higher than the quality of one being viewed on the internet as when a image is printed out it needs higher quality than an image that you view on your computer.

Aspect Ratio

Easiest way to explain aspect ratio is to say that it means the ratio between the width of the picture and the height of the picture. When you resize a picture you need to ensure to calculate the aspect ratio of the new size to ensure the picture is not stretched or skewed. Most resize tools such as Picture Resize will do this for you.

Every medium such as email, websites and online resize images photo galleries show pictures differently, each one need their pictures resized to different heights widths and quality.
The problems that you will face are; pictures hare too big, too small, appear stretched or skewed or appear blocky and may even have bits missing here and there, these are all signs of an image not being resized properly to fit the medium they are on.

Images are too big:

  • If the pictures are too big then the Height and width of the image is too large.
  • Blocky looking pictures
  • Height and width too small on the image
  • Or the quality is too low.
  • Images appear stretched or skewed.
  • This has the affect of like looking into a fun mirror at a carnival, things either appear too tall or too short and too wide. The reason for this is because the aspect ratio has been compromised
  • These are all symptoms of images being resized incorrectly, they need to be resized properly for the medium they are appearing on.

Solution

  • What to do if your images are showing signs of not being resized properly by an image resizer
  • Pictures too big
  • Reduce height and width
  • Keep aspect ratio
  • Pictures too blocky
  • Increase quality
  • Increase height and width
  • Stretched or skewed
  • Fix aspect ratio
  • Image Resizer Tools

I have been resizing images for many years and have used different tools, there’s a whole slew of them on the web and in your favorite computer store, they range from free to $600 plus and they all do a good job.

The free version of the image resizer, Picture Resize, will give you everything you need to start resizing images, it even batch resizes images for you. The full version has many extra features that you will find you will need as you learn more about resizing pictures and you can easily upgrade it.

What I like about Picture Resize is that it has preset sizes for you to use which removes all the hard work of determining the best sizes to resize your image to depending on the medium such as email, online photo galleries or documents you are resizing your image to.

As you see the complex task of resizing images with an image resizer can be made simple to make your pictures look perfect no matter what medium you are showing them on.