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Resizing pictures on the fly
by Stephen M. Canale If you’re a Windows XP user, then you’ll love Microsoft’s Image Resizer PowerToy. It almost seems to have been designed with real estate agents in mind. After all, what profession takes more digital photographs and needs to resize them for a variety of needs?
Once the Image Resizer is installed, you can right-click your mouse on any standard graphic (JPG, GIF, TIF, etc.), and a drop-down menu appears with a Resize Images option. Not only can you select images for resizing from Windows Explorer, but also from most other programs as well. The result of this handy integration is that you can quickly and easily resize images from within most e-mail software programs just prior to attaching the pictures to an outgoing e-mail.
When you choose the Resize Images option, you’ll be presented with four choices: small (640 x 480), medium (800 x 600), large (1024 x 768), or handheld (240 x 320). While there may be many reasons to choose any of these preformatted sizes, it is the small and handheld options that will likely be of greatest use for real estate professionals.
The handheld size is perfect for sending a number of property photographs attached to a single e-mail, and also for resizing images for use on a Web page. You may prefer the small option when e-mailing a single photograph to a customer or client.
For perspective, I resized a 1.1 megapixel photograph to both the small and handheld sizes, which reduced the file to 91k and 13k respectively. This substantial reduction in file size will enable you to e-mail pictures to your customers and clients in much less time.
What makes this utility even better is that under the default settings, Image Resizer will not alter your original pictures, which you may want to retain for high-resolution printing. While you can override this setting if you prefer, the standard resizing option will create a copy of the original and name it with the same name as your original plus (small), or whatever size you selected, appended to it.
Likely the greatest time savings will come from the ability to select multiple photographs and resize them all at once. This means that immediately after transferring digital images from your camera to your computer, you can instantly resize duplicates for use on your Web site and for e-mail, all with a couple of mouse clicks.
It’s important
to note that the XP Image Resizer is not an officially supported Microsoft
program but instead an "extra" you can download and install to any Windows
XP system. Download Image Resizer at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/
Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe
Stephen M. Canale, CRB, CRS, GRI, RAM, (Canale.com) is a speaker, educator, and trainer from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Illustration © Artville.
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