Now that you can buy a 10MP digital camera cheap on eBay, it’s much more common to see your digital photos go up in size from 1MB to 7MB! If you take RAW photos, they can be 15MB +! Obviously it gets a lot harder to try to email or download these photos due to attachment size limits or simply because it takes a long time to download 10 5MB images! So, I’ll share two ways to send large digital images quickly and easily!
Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8 have a built-in feature that takes your photos and automatically resizes them to a manageable size, then attaches them to an email in your default email program. Using this method, you need to have Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail as your email program, because Windows is really annoying with the default programs. If you don’t use any of these for your email, there is a little trick you can use to get the resized file without using the default email program, but otherwise you’ll need to download and install the free app.
The first step is to go to your photos folder and select the photos you want to resize. Once selected, you will see an option on the left or at the top depending on which version of Windows you are using, titled Email, Email this file, or Email selected files.
After you click on this, you will be presented with another dialog that asks you if you want to reduce the images or keep them the same size. Go ahead and select “Make all my photos smaller.” On Windows 7 and later, you will see another dialog asking you to select the image size from smallest to largest. By selecting this option, you will also see the approximate size of the resized images, which is a very handy feature they added.
Click OK and Windows will resize all images and open a new email using the default email program with images attached!
Now, if you’re one of those people who don’t use any of the three programs listed above for their email, this won’t work! There are two workarounds. The first is to simply upload the resized images and then attach them to you wherever you want. To do this, simply right-click the name of the image in the Attached section of the email and select Save As.
You can simply save the thumbnail image to your computer and you’re done. Another and probably easier option is to download the Image Resizer for Windows, which adds a resize option to the right-click context menu.
After installation, go to the folder with your files, select them, right-click one of the selected images, and you will see a new menu item called “Resize Images”.
When you click on that, you will see a screen similar to the previous one, where you can select a size from small to large. You also have a few additional options with this program, such as choosing a custom size and replacing the originals if you like. The Compressed Images Only option does not resize images smaller than the size you specify.
Click Resize and your file will be created in the same directory as the original file, but with a different name. Now all you have to do is go into your email program and attach smaller files to it!
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