Have you ever asked, “How can I make my picture smaller?” Large pictures are great for printing, display on a monitor and projector slideshows, but if you’re putting a picture on the web, it needs to be a lot smaller than the size that comes out of most digital cameras.

Large pictures on a website either take too long to load or they fill the screen, pushing text and other necessary elements out of their place.

That’s where ShrinkPictures.com comes in. This is a very basic website with one purpose – shrink your pictures. Just select the file from your computer select the necessary options, then hit “Resize”. It’ll do all the work for you and offer your image in a smaller size.

There are a couple of options here, so let’s look at them:

• “Select New Maximum Image dimension” – 350 pixels will allow for text to wrap around the image on most sites. If you want to fill a column or the page, go for 600 or 760. The image above is 350 x 350 displayed at 200 x 200.
• “Apply an image Special effect (Optional)” – ShrinkPictures.com will even make your picture black and white or sepia tone.
• “Set resized image quality (jpg compression)” - Medium should work for most purposes here, but if you want the image to be sharp, choose “Best”.

There are many more ways to resize images. I prefer using GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), myself. The learning curve is steep if you’ve never used image editing software. GIMP is a power-packed open source software, free for download, that opens, edits and saves many popular image formats, including EPS and PSD.

GIMP is overkill if you just need to resize a picture, but I keep it around for other purposes.

Another option is using Microsoft’s Image Resizer. This is a small plugin that Microsoft offers as a free download to resize images right at your computer. It offers simple functionality built right into Windows. Download the file and install it, then right-click on any image to see the “Resize” option.

Any of these tools will get the job done, but the quickest, easiest way to resize is to use ShrinkPictures.com.