Just after a Holiday trip you are trying to mail trip photos to your family and friends, and you realized that size of each photo is more than 5MB and sending those 100 photos over email will not be possible. Don’t worry, all you need to do is to resize your photos and reduce its file size.
This problem is caused when your 12 Megapixel camera is clicking photos with resolution 4200×2800 or even more. Now fact is that even 1600×1200 resolution is good enough for viewing photos on Computer screen or for posting it on social networking sites.
So keep the original size images on some backup storage (maybe on your 3TB Hard drive), and lets reduce size of images (to 1600×1200) for distribution purposes.
Reducing size of photos is very easy by using free image viewer software IrfanView. IrfanView comes with many image editing tools which are required for managing images.
Here you will be using batch editing functionality to resize images and reduce the file size. Steps are very simple –
1) Open IrfanView. Go to File Menu >Click Batch Conversion/Rename option.
2) This will open a dialog box. Here you have to browse to the location where your all images are stored. Select all images and click on ‘Add All’ button.
3) This will list all the image files in Input List, these images will be converted.
4) Now you need to decide the Output Folder. This will be the folder where images will be stored after conversion. You can either use Browse button to specify any folder or click ‘Use Current Directory’ button to choose your current image folder. However if you choose same directory for input and output, please be clear that it will overwrite your existing files. So please take a backup beforehand.
5) Specify settings for resizing, such as what should be the new height and width. These settings can be accessed by clicking on ‘Advance’ button. If ‘Use Advance Option’ checkbox is unchecked, check it first only then Advance button will be enabled.
6) Clicking on Advance button will open a dialog box where you can specify what operation you want to apply on all images (remember this is batch operation so all images will be edited in one go). Here click on ‘RESIZE’ checkbox and set new size of the image. You can either specify exact height and width or set new size as percent of original image size. I prefer to set image size as 50% but here lets set it as 1600 for width and 1200 for height.
7) Make sure that ‘Preserve aspect ratio’ checkbox is checked, otherwise your images get distorted and will not look good. If you want to overwrite original images with new images, make sure that you check the ‘Overwrite existing file’ option in Miscellaneous settings section otherwise un-check it. Now click on OK and this dialog will be closed.
8) Now you are all set to start batch conversion. Click on ‘Start Batch’ button and conversion will start. An output window will give you status of each converted file.
9) Once conversion is over, click on ‘Exit batch’ button and you are done.
These steps will not only reduce the resolution of image but also the total image file size. IrfanView is a very powerful tool which comes with many features. Start exploring them and soon you will be using it for all type of batch image processing.