Photo Resizer

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

Most of you know that I am a stickler for photo size (many would say a pain in the association)!  While I have tried hard to explain about upload limits and photo hosting, it's really not something you're all that interested in,,, you just want to upload your photos.

So, I have found something that can work very nicely, costs you nothing, is fun to use, and it will even help you fix your profile photo where they cut off the top of your head.  The steps are easy, especially if you use Flickr, Picasa, or any of the photo sites where you upload your pictures.

Here is the website: http://webresizer.com/resizer/

This is what you will see:

Very simply, you upload your picture and it resizes AUTOMATICALLY and as you can see above on the left there is virtually NO difference in how it looks, only in how much space it takes up and how much faster your photos upload.

Here is an example:

I selected this photo of myself, making sure that it was over 1MB in size.  Immediately after it was uploaded this screen popped up and it calculated that the picture would work nicely on the web 94% smaller.  All that you have to do once you've uploaded is click download this image under the optimized image and save it to your computer.  The filename will be the same except that the program will add _opt so that you know it is the optimized version that you want to upload to any website (especially this one).

Example: original filename- phil005.jpg  optimized name- phil005_opt.jpg

For those who need to use a cropping tool, the program shows a pair of scissors above your photo.  When you click on that you will see this:

The program places a window almost perfectly at the center.  You can move the window up-down-right-left with your keyboard arrow keys.  You can change the width or height with you mouse.  What I did here was use the manual width/height setting above the photo to make a w180xh180 square which is perfect for your profile photo.  Enter the numbers making sure they are both the same and click on set.  The window will now be squared to those dimensions.

Once the window is square, you can move it so that you get the look you want for your profile.  (Do NOT change the dimensions again with your mouse, just move the window.)  When you're done, click the [apply changes] box, then download this image to your computer.  You can now upload it into your profile page and be assured that it works.

I strongly urge you to use this application, not just for this site but for emailing photos, giving yourself more space on your own computer hard drive, or using on your other personal websites.  This is a very cool tool and worth bookmarking for all your photo editing needs.