Image Resizer

[xseption]

Thanks for the Power Toys link! Cool stuff ...

~ edd

[RichardM]

Here's another free image resizer tool that specializes in creating thumbnails:
http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/

Looks fairly useful...will let you specify quality, brightness, contrast,  sharpness, rotation, as well as various filter and size options.

[RichardM]

And for Vista users:

How to resize photos in Vista

There are many applications that you can use to reduce the size of photos you take at high resolution. Another way, that doesn't require you to install third party software, is to use Windows Photo Gallery in Vista. It lets you set the picture size at 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024 or the original size when you click the "Email" button (and it tells you the estimated file size in KB or MB for each resolution). And you don't actually have to send the photo to take advantage of this resizing ability; you can go through the process and then, when the mail message window opens with the resized photo attached, you can just drag it onto the desktop.

[RichardM]

I may or may not have mentioned here before, but another useful free tool is the Batch File Renamer.  Especially useful for creating unique file names for a series of pictures.  That way when you upload them to the BigBendGallery site, you'll have a much lesser chance of overwriting someone else's pics.

[RichardM]

Here's another free image resizer tool that specializes in creating thumbnails:
http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/

Looks fairly useful...will let you specify quality, brightness, contrast,  sharpness, rotation, as well as various filter and size options.

The latest version (3.0) also lets you add a "Make Thumbnail" menu option to Windows Explorer.  That way you can select one or more files and create thumbnails without having to open the program first, navigate to the appropriate folder, etc.  It uses whatever settings you last used and creates the thumbnail files in the current folder.  This works great as an image resizer where you could set it at a maximum size of 640x640, although you'd need to lower the JPG quality setting to reduce the file size as much as the Windows XP Image Resizer.

[dkerr24]

One of the things I missed most about XP was the neat little powertoy offered by MS that allowed you a simple right click of the mouse to resize any image file.  I upgraded to Win 7 recently and have been searching for a similiar powertoy.

I found one that works just like the power toy in XP.  Here's a link:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Image-Resizer-Powertoy-Clone.shtml

[SHANEA]

VSO Image Resizer

[RichardM]

One of the things I missed most about XP was the neat little powertoy offered by MS that allowed you a simple right click of the mouse to resize any image file. I upgraded to Win 7 recently and have been searching for a similiar powertoy.

I found one that works just like the power toy in XP. Here's a link:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Image-Resizer-Powertoy-Clone.shtml

Maybe you could convince them to add a "resize and retain current dimensions" option. About half the resizing I do is at the same pixel size. Sure is a pain to have to input the dimensions in the "custom" option if you're working with lots of files.

I'm still trying to get my current PC with XP limping along. It'll probably have to be replaced pretty soon, as it gets slower each day.

Update: I uninstalled the Windoze Search feature that was installed during one of the M$ updates a month or so ago. The PC speeded up quite a bit.

[dkerr24]

I liked this program as it closely matches the XP Powertoy and works within Windows Explorer unlike stand alone image software.  I like being able to mass-select a group of jpg's and resize them for uploading to Photobucket, etc.

So far, I like Windows 7 quite a lot.  It's very stable, seems to run fast on lower-performance PC's.  Pretty much Vista but without all the bloat.

[SHANEA]

VSO, FREE - and FREE is GOOD, allows you to input a certain size and save it as default.  It will also do multiple pictures at once.

WARNING 

Richard, what is the name of that website for looking at the history of webpages? 

[RichardM]

WARNING 

Richard, what is the name of that website for looking at the history of webpages? 

Are you talking about the Internet Archive Wayback Machine?

[RichardM]

http://www.picnik.com/ will also allow you to resize files easily online without downloading or installing any software. Once you've loaded and possibly edited your picture, go to the "Save & Share" option and it'll let you specify dimensions (by pixels or percent), output type, and for JPG, compression quality. As you change output options, it'll estimate file size in kb.

[RichardM]

One of the things I missed most about XP was the neat little powertoy offered by MS that allowed you a simple right click of the mouse to resize any image file.  I upgraded to Win 7 recently and have been searching for a similiar powertoy.

I found one that works just like the power toy in XP.  Here's a link:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Image-Resizer-Powertoy-Clone.shtml

It looks like this one isn't using the same algorithms as the XP PowerToy. With the XP version I almost never got increased file size when resizing to the same dimensions. Unless it was a very small file, the resulting file was always smaller (usually much smaller) or at worst, the same size. Tonight I had 6 or 7 files come back much bigger in file size. Bummer. Guess I'll have to do a bit more work while trying to conserve file server space.

VSO Image Resizer

This one seems more powerful, but requires a lot more clicks to do what I want to do, which is simply reduce the file size while retaining the pixel dimensions with minimal loss in picture quality.

[Al]

One of the things I missed most about XP was the neat little powertoy offered by MS that allowed you a simple right click of the mouse to resize any image file. I upgraded to Win 7 recently and have been searching for a similiar powertoy.

I found one that works just like the power toy in XP. Here's a link:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Image-Resizer-Powertoy-Clone.shtml

It looks like this one isn't using the same algorithms as the XP PowerToy. With the XP version I almost never got increased file size when resizing to the same dimensions. Unless it was a very small file, the resulting file was always smaller (usually much smaller) or at worst, the same size. Tonight I had 6 or 7 files come back much bigger in file size. Bummer. Guess I'll have to do a bit more work while trying to conserve file server space.

Is there an option of the quality of the saved *.jpg?  With most programs it's set for medium quality so each time a *.jpg file is saved, the file size and quality is reduced.  If quality is set on high, the file size may not be reduced.

Al

[RichardM]

One of the things I missed most about XP was the neat little powertoy offered by MS that allowed you a simple right click of the mouse to resize any image file. I upgraded to Win 7 recently and have been searching for a similiar powertoy.

I found one that works just like the power toy in XP. Here's a link:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Image-Resizer-Powertoy-Clone.shtml

It looks like this one isn't using the same algorithms as the XP PowerToy. With the XP version I almost never got increased file size when resizing to the same dimensions. Unless it was a very small file, the resulting file was always smaller (usually much smaller) or at worst, the same size. Tonight I had 6 or 7 files come back much bigger in file size. Bummer. Guess I'll have to do a bit more work while trying to conserve file server space.

Is there an option of the quality of the saved *.jpg?  With most programs it's set for medium quality so each time a *.jpg file is saved, the file size and quality is reduced.  If quality is set on high, the file size may not be reduced.

The Powertoy clone doesn't but VSO does. Just for grins I ran one of gam's recent attached photos through both. Original file size was 318kb. The Powertoy clone bumped it up to 436kb, while VSO set at 90% using linear filtering bloated it to a whopping 596kb. I can no longer use the original XP PowerToy Image Resizer, but I'd be surprised if it created anything bigger than 250kb at the same dimensions.