Shrink Pictures

Help with Resizing your Photos and Images

Resizing Images for the Web

In our Tutorials on Understanding Pixels and Understanding DPI and PPI we mentioned a bit about how a photo is displayed on screen and how many pixels make up a screen. What we will do is to further explore what size we need to make our pictures for posting on a website and even sending by email for viewing on a computer screen.

If we look at a typical 17" computer monitor, the native resolution is 1280x1024 Pixels. So, it is fair to say that at the absolute most, to view an image on a screen you want it to be just a little bit smaller. In practical terms there are reasons for going even smaller than this.

Why would you want to go smaller? well there are several reasons! Firstly, someone who is viewing your pictures might have an older computer and a smaller screen. You might be sending the pictures to your granny, who has the screen set to 800x 600 so her old eyes can read the messages. You are probably going to post the images on your blog or Facebook account.

So, the reasons are stacking up to make the images smaller, but how small? Well lets look at the examples given above as to how you might use the photos online. If you do, then in most cases, 600px is an ideal size for viewing web images. Why 600? well, facebook allows a maximum size of 604px (and actually resizes them to this size if you upload anything any bigger), Granny, might only have 600px without scrolling.

600px is a pretty good size as well if you are interested in protecting your copyright - as we will go over in our tutorial on resizing images for print. A 600px sized photo is generally large enough to see the details in it on the screen and it has an added benefit of having a file size of around 100k - so when you send it by email it will not clog up your friends inbox!

There are some instances where you might need to have smaller images than 600px for displaying on the web, such as posting a photo in your blog. A lot of blogs have a fixed width and a 600px image might "blow out" the side. If your blog has a fixed size, you might need to experiment on what size you need and a good starting point is 350px.

By using our free resize images tools you can quickly prepare your pictures and photos for sharing online.

There is still one more specialized web image that most people encounter and that is the creation of a Web Avatar. An Avatar is simply a picture that represents you and is usually part of your profile on Message Boards and Forums. An avatar is usually a picture that is square and quite small - between 40 and 150 pixels. One of our Free Tools is specifically designed to help you turn any picture into an avatar for you to use on Forums and that is our Create Avatar Tool. It will take your regular photo and resize and also crop it to a square.

When you need to resize more than 1 photo at a time we use and recommend BatchPhoto. This software is capable of not only resizing a batch of photos it can also do several other tasks to your batch of photos as well such as renaming.