Resize Photos In A Snap

I bet you’ve seen it.  Visit a website or blog and click on a picture to enlarge it and its not only bigger, it is HUGE.  So big in fact that the horizontal scroll bars appear at the bottom of your browser.  Equally as bad are the web applications that allow you to upload your pictures that “resize your photos” automatically without truly optimizing them.  Yikes!  These images not only waste the time of your visitors in download time but also sacrifices precious bandwidth and money.

Many people I suspect think that if they can download their pictures from their digital camera in their raw form, the photos are ready for the web when nothing could be further from the truth.

This is an issue that is easily addressed by Photoshop, GIMP or a similar program.  But how do you solve it without buying or learning yet another piece of software?  Now, its easy with a product called Shrink-o-Matic.  Shrink-o-Matic is an AIR application that easily resizes images to the dimensions you choose handling the jpeg, gif and png file formats.  Now you can download your digital camera photos to a folder on your desktop, open the folder, select all of the images, and drag them to the Shrink-o-matic interface and Presto!, web optimized images to upload to your website or blog.

For step by step instructions on how to use Shrink-o-Matic, you must first download and install Shrink-o-matic it from their website.

Once installed, its pretty slick how this operates.  Create a folder on your desktop called “Raw Images” and fill it with images that you downloaded from your camera.  Next, make another folder on your desktop and call it “Optimized”.  Once that’s done, we can begin to use Shrink-o-Matic.  In this example I have six images taken from our record breaking 98″ of snow in 2009 that average between 2-3 megabytes each.  Way too big for the web.  We’re looking for 15-30 kilobyte for each image.  Let’s see how we can do this.

1. Download between 6-8 digital images from your camera to the “Raw Images” folder.
2. Start up Shrink-o-matic.
3. Note the configurations on the Shrink-o-matic interface (enlarge the pic above for highlights).  To start out with, try the following settings:
   1. Under Output size, select Ratio and adjust the slider bar to 20%.
   2. Under Output name, select “Auto-rename” and check the check box called “Specify Output folder” then browse to the “Optimized” folder you created on your desktop earlier.
   3. Finally, under Output format, let’s assume your going to want to create .jpeg files which is typical.  BUT, pay attention to the compression of the image.  It’s not obvious but it’s the little slider beside the JPG (quality) option.  Typically, in programs like PhotoShop, a web optimized JPG image holds its quality well between 50-60% compression.  Let’s select 50 for this example.
4. Now open the “Raw Images” folder and select all of them.  (Cntrl + A)
5. Select all of your images from the raw images folder.
6. Drag the images to the Shrink-o-Matic interface as seen below and let the tool do the rest.

The Results

Now those images that were between 2-3 megabytes now average 17-25 kilobytes each and will load a browser far quicker.  They are now optimized for the web.  For those more experienced users, this is a simple tool that will perform quick and dirty compression when your in a hurry.  For those less experienced users or those who have no interest in learning graphic software, Shrink-o-matic performs well enough that no one will have an excuse anymore for bulky images clogging up the web.  It took a little bit of experimentation on getting the quality and the size right where I wanted it, but once you get the hang of it, its a snap.

What once were huge images that filled up a screen-and-a-half of precious real estate are now are a manageable size and still communicate the intended effect.

Tagged as: computer graphics, computing, digital camera, digital cameras, digital imaging, digital photography, graphic design, graphics file formats, image optimization, images, iso standards, jpeg, optimize image, photograph, portable network graphics, proprietary software, raw image, raw image format, resize image, resize photos, shrink