"HOW TO RESIZE YOUR PHOTOS FOR UPLOADING & EMAILING" Personal Page by kiwi

I'll write a stepbystep account of how to resize your photos using Picasa3. This is a free downloadable programme, and easy to use once you know the system.
Picasa is one of the set of Google programmes and can be found on the google website. As google is regional I'll explain how to find it rather than give you a url, so you then get your own region site.
Go to www.google.com - (it defaults to your region, eg mine is www.google.co.nz)

At the top of the page above the Google logo, on the left side, you see:

>Web, Images, Maps, News, Groups, Gmail, more ▼.

Click on the word "more" , at the bottom of the dropdown list, click on "even more".
This takes you to the list of Google products and under the heading "Communicate, show & share" you will find Picasa, click on it and follow instructions to download.

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RESIZING PHOTOS

1. Open Picasa and allow it time to populate any new folders from your “My Pictures” folder.
You will see your folders in a column on the left hand side. Personal settings may change how things are viewed of course. I should mention at this point that Picasa selects folders from your "My Pictures". If your photos are stored elsewhere on your computer, you will need to instruct Picasa to select those folders, or else move the folder to My Pictures.

2. Click on the folder you want to work with and you will see the contents appear in the main Picasa screen.

3. To resize the entire contents of the folder just single click on one photo to highlight it.
Then press CTRL + A to select all the photos. (This means hold down your Ctrl key and the 'A' key at the same time).
You will see they appear on the bottom left side in the working “tray”.

4. If you look carefully you can see an icon representing a drawing pin, marked on the accompanying photo here in the tutorial. It's a little hard to see, but when you put your cursor over the Pin, it reads "Hold Selected Items". Once your photos are in the working tray, click this Pin and hold the selected photos. This means these are the photos you will work on. This step is indicated by tiny circles appearing on each photo in the working tray, indicating they are "held". If you only wish to resize a select few of the photos in an album, just select and 'hold' them one at a time.

OK NOW YOU ARE READY TO BEGIN THE RESIZE FUNCTION.

5. Click on the EXPORT button. (This button is indicated on the first photo with this tutorial). What this will do is "export" the photos and at the same time create a copy folder and change their size all in one hit. The first time you set up the settings, if they are what you like then you don't need to reset every time.

If you enlarge the second tutorial photo you will see the Resize window has some areas marked. These are what you need to set yourself. I have created a folder called "Pictures Reduced" where all my resize photo folders go to.
As well as that I add the letters "sm" to the folder name so as not to confuse it with the original fullsize photos.

RESIZE WINDOW:

a. Browse to the place on your computer where you want the resized photo folder to be stored.

b. Change the folder name so it is different to the original, eg add "sm" to the name.

c. Set the size you wish to resize to.

d. Set the quality. (At this point you can also add a copyright mark if you wish. The box for this is at the bottom of the Resize Window).

CLICK OK


Just a little bit on size.
I choose 1200 wide (other dimentions set automatically). This may be too big for you. It depends on your camera, and how you plan to use the photos. eg I use the reduced photos for both uploading to VT and other sites, and for emailing. But I have broadband and most of my friends do as well, so they can deal with 5 or 6 photos adding up to 2MB eg. If you or your friends have dialup, you will need to consider smaller size, eg 800 wide. The higher quality your camera, the larger the original size photos.
As well as this, the quality setting also alters the file size.
I choose “normal” as it is the happy medium. But you can choose more or less quality. I might point out here that I personally don’t want too high quality on the net (I load to other websites as well as VT) so they can’t be “stolen” for commercial use.
You can adjust these around a few times and find the combination that you like. When you finally do, the settings will hold and you don’t need to change again.

After you have clicked OK, the resize process will begin and when finished Picasa automatically opens the location where your new folder is saved.

You may ask about portrait and landscape photos, with the resize process. My Picasa and Windows versions show the fullsize portrait photos on their side, therefore the dimensions are still correct. When the reduced folder opens they portrait photos are resized and now displaying in their correct portrait way. I hope this makes sense, and it is possible your software versions may not do this.

This tutorial may look long and complicated but once you have created your settings, they stay and as you become familiar with the process it is then a quick step in managing your photos.
If you have any difficulties with any steps of the tutorial, please email me so I can both help you and rewrite any instructions if needed. Cheers!!