Christmas is past for another year and as always, all those great parties and dinners added a few unwanted pounds; for the next few weeks I’ll be sweating on the exercise bike more than usual to get back into my jeans comfortably. But my body isn’t the only thing I need to reduce.

With all the photo opps during the holiday season and a new Nikon to play with, I took hundreds of high resolution pictures. I shot at high quality because, well, why not? It doesn’t cost any more and that way you can crop as you wish and make large prints if you want. But when it comes time to post them on the blog or send them to friends in email, those large file sizes can be a problem.

Resampling a single photo or two is no big deal. You can use most any photo manipulation program. But what if you want to resize a whole batch of photos at once? Well, I found a neat little freeware program that works in just about any Windows operating system, including Vista; it’s called Easy Thumbnails and you can download it at http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/ .

Just select the photos you want to resize (or put them into a folder and select the folder), as shown here (click on the graphics for an enlarged version):

You can set the maximum height and width to whatever you’d like, and as an added bonus, you can adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness and rotate photos within the resizing operation, as shown here:

It’s a very simple little program and it simply works. The new resized pictures don’t replace your originals; they’re saved with a new file name ("tn_" is appended to the original name of each) so you don’t have to worry about losing the high quality version.

Here you can see the file sizes of the originals (without the "tn_" designation) compared to the new thumbnail versions:

If you have a large number of photos that you want to trim down to sendable size all in one fell swoop, I highly recommend Easy Thumbnails.

deb@shinder.net