Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: November 8th, 2009 
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I often end up with photos that are bigger than they need to be: snapshots of friends and family don’t really need to be in super-high resolution, neither do photos that students have taken with the digital camera. Of course I could change the camera settings before I start taking the photos, but I never think to do that.
Dropresize sorts that problem for me. It’s a really simple little tool and really easy to use:
To install it:
- Download it from here (hat tip to Lifehacker)
- Extract the files
That’s it – it’s ready to use, no further installation required.
To run it:
- Just run the .exe file. It doesn’t sneak into the programs menu, so just find the folder you extracted it to and double click – how very nostalgic! Once it’s running an icon appears in the taskbar.
- On the first time of running, you need to tell it which folder you would like it to watch. (Being of vast imagination, I called mine Resize.)
- Tell it how many pixels wide you want the pictures to be.
- Dump everything that you want to resize into the watched folders. If you want to keep the originals, you will need to copy and paste. This might be useful if you are just shrinking some copies of pictures that will be emailed or put on the web, but don’t want to lose the quality of the original photos. (I know this should be obvious, but some commenters at Semigeek didn’t seem to realise this.) If you want to shrink the originals, just put them in the resize folder. The icon in the taskbar will change to show that Dropresize is shrinking the pictures. Once it’s finished the icon changes back and you can move the pictures back to another folder if you wish.
It’s pretty fast, although obviously the speed depends on how many files you ask it to resize at once. It’s also pretty ace – I’ve cleared the most amazing amount of space on my busting-at-the-seams laptop today, just by shrinking snapshots.
I’ve used this on Vista without problems (so that’s a first!); it should also work with XP and Windows 7, but I haven’t tried it with either (yet).
