(USING MICROSOFT OFFICE PICTURE MANAGER)

We know that size really does count when you are trying to upload one of your photographs to a website or you are trying to email it to a friend but it is way to big and it’s just sitting in your outbox while your computer tries hard not to crash….and even if your computer can handle this big image without any issues – you still need to be considerate of the person your are sending the photo (or photos) too. Maybe they only have dial up! This means that the 1MP photo you just sent them in 2 minutes could take then a good 15 minutes of internet time to download…and if you sent a whole email full of 1MP photos…oh dear!

When you are sharing your pictures via email, a ‘polite’ size is around 50kb per picture. These images won’t be printed or used for anything other than sharing.

If you want to send your friends or family some pictures that they might want to print – I usually send them the small 50kb images first and then if they want a higher quality one I will send that through at their request.

Pictures for websites can also be 50kb for easy and fast loading. If you want to make sure that your pictures are a good quality – then 150kb is a good aim. An image that is bigger than this can actually take a long time to load on a computer that is not linked up with the best internet. People might even become bored with waiting and just close the website before they have a chance to see your photo.

You camera, on a Large Quality setting might be taking photos that are anywhere between 2MP and 8MP (point and shoot through to entry level DSLRs) and of course the better the camera the bigger the image is going to be.

So how do you take those photos that you have snapped and share them with your friends without clogging up their email or slowing their internet to a non-existent pace?

It’s actually SUPER easy!!

Firstly – and very importantly – DON’T SAVE OVER YOUR ORIGINAL PHOTO. I have done this by mistake a few times and it was really disappointing. A photo I might have wanted to print was reduced to email quality and because I had saved over the original it was lost.

So step one is to create a New Folder on your computer. With no programs open and your computer just sitting with the “desktop” viewed – Right Click an empty space on your desktop with your mouse button – in the list that appears select New – in the next list that appears select Folder.

A new folder will appear on your desktop and you can now name that folder (small photos for emailing or something like that).
If you want to rename it later you can always click once on the folder and then hit the F2 key which will allow you to rename it.

Now go to your folder of photos that you want to resize. If you want to resize ALL of the pictures in that folder – Hold down your Ctrl Key + A (this means select all) and all of your pictures will be selected. Then hold down your Ctrl Key + C (this means that the computer is taking a copy of each of those pictures). Now you can close your photo album and go back to your desk top where you have created your new folder.

Open the new folder and click inside the empty space of the folder. Now hold down your Ctrl Key + V (this tells the computer to paste a the copies it has just taken) If you accidentally click V twice it is going to paste two sets of copies – so try and avoid this.
(if that happens – hold down Crtl + Z (to undo last action)

Now your new folder is filled up with a copy of each of your photos. You can even go back to your original folder of photos to make sure they are still there if you like.

You can also repeat these steps if there are a couple of sets of photos you want to resize. You can “paste / Ctrl+V” as many photos from various folders as your like into your new folder for resizing.

Now that you have a copy of each photo you can edit and resize those copies without having any effect on your original image.

Now – in your new folder. Right click any of the pictures – just one of them – and in the list that appears select “OPEN WITH” in the next list – select “Microsoft Office Picture Manager”.

Your photo will now open in Picture Manager.
You can either edit the size of one photo at a time (this can be really time consuming if you have a whole batch to do) or you can do the whole folder in one go.

One at a time:

Click EDIT on the top bar of the program and an edit tool bar will open on the right hand side. In that tool bar select Compress (NOT resize, as this changes dimension by not file size)

edit-compress

 

 

 

compress

Inside the compress menu you now have four options.
1) Don’t compress – leaves the file at its original size
2) Document – still good for printing, around 500KB
3) Web – for sharing in the internet – around 81kb
4) Email – file will be around 10kb

5) in this circle you can see the original size of the image and the size it will be if you click on any of the options (1 – 4). When you have your ideal size you can click ok to enforce the changes. If you don’t click ok – it won’t keep the change you have made.

A NOTE: generally “Email” (option 4) is too small for most things. This can be used to create thumbnail images, but for emailing a picture to a friend you can use the 3rd option “Web” 

Once you have clicked ok you can either move onto the next image by clicking the little blue arrow at the bottom of the window or your can select “file” in the top bar and say “save” to save your resized image.

Editing a Whole Group In One Go:
Starting in your New Folder – right click one of the images and say Open With “Microsoft Picture Manager”

Once the program is open – change the view from being One image – to All by clicking the little button at the top left of the screen.
inonego

Now all of your images are going to appear as thumb nail in the program. Click on one of the images and then press Ctrl+A (to select All of them) now with all the images selected you can follow the same steps as before. Click Edit – Compress – and choose your compression type. Then click OK and then select File – Save ALL.

If you are going to do a really big batch in one go – keep in mind that this might take a lot of thinking power from your machine. If it’s a really big batch and your computer is not too ‘strong’ then when you do big batch compressions – click OK and be prepared to go and make yourself some coffee while you wait…

othertools

Other features in the program that you might find handy:

1) this lets you view all of your images in one go for batch editing
2) view images one at a time
3) rotate your image anti-clockwise
4) rotate your image clockwise
5) editing tools that let you change the colour/contrast of your image and let you trim it to cut out pieces of the picture
6) Auto Correct – clicking this button will automatically calculate the best ‘fix up’ for colour/contrast etc in your image. Be carefull as this doesn’t always have good results 
7) Zoom in and out of your picture
8) Save or print your picture
9) Delete your picture all together
10) Undo your last action (like pressing Auto Correct and then not being happy with the results – your can click this button to undo it) and Redo.