I personally make use of a little program called ‘ Fast Image Resizer‘ all the time. The thing to remember is… never send a picture that is bigger than would fit on someone’s screen, it’s just a waste of bandwidth! So if you’re sending Grandma some pictures of your grandchildren, resize them to somewhere between 800-1200 pixels on the long edge, and she will be able to see them just as well, while she’ll only have to wait for 20 seconds, instead of 3 minutes for them to download!

Very few people need more than that, and most people don’t ever even need to see the picture fullscreen.

For most websites, that’s a maximum of about 1200 pixels. Obviously, that’s a whole lot less than 12 MP! When you send an e-mail with a picture in it to someone, the picture might be about 800 pixels wide, that would take up a little more than half of my computer screen.

Now, your computer screen likely has a screen resolution of 1024×768, or in my case, 1440×900. If you have a 12 megapixel camera, it takes pictures that measure about 4000px by 3000px, that makes 12,000,000 pixels (or 12 MP ). Resizing very literally changes the size of the picture. First, we’d better be sure that we know the difference between resizing, and compressing. Now I want to show what tools I use as a photographer and web designer for resizing and compressing images, so that you don’t have to wait 3 minutes to view that 24 megapixel, 12.3 MB photo that I sent you a link to. I have previously written about some photography related software, Exif viewers, and Photo viewers.

Can faststone photo resizer compress