Cameras are taking photos with increasing amazing resolutions. This means the megapixels keep growing and growing. Fortunately, you can crop small portions of your photos and still print them with clarity. Unfortunately, this means the photos are becoming very large and unwieldy in size.
These growing file sizes are causing issues in all sorts of areas, the most important being backups. They also cause issues with manipulating and transferring those files.
Many people have online photo albums either on Facebook, Flickr, Google+, or digital scrapbooks they’ve created. Photo galleries are becoming popular on many corporate websites. Photos help sales when listing products on eBay or Kijiji. Emailing batches of trip or family photos to your relatives is common.
The problem: transferring (uploading) these large photo files to these websites in large quantities can be a painful experience. Emails generally have a limit of 8MB worth of attachments, this can sometimes be only 2 photos! Many websites have limits on how large the files can be when uploading. It can be super slow and painful transferring large numbers of photos online.
There is a solution!
One of my prior posts helped you rename a large number of photos at once and merge them together sequentially (based on camera time and date) from multiple cameras. This was the bulk rename utility. See Merging Vacation Photos From Multiple Cameras.
There is a bulk (batch) resize utility… enter FastStone Photo Resizer. This handy program (free for personal use) should be part of everyone’s toolkit. It allows you to select a directory of full of images (many different formats supported including jpg) and perform the same thing on every one of them. This includes converting them, renaming them, and most importantly, resizing them all.
You can resize them based on a percentage or based on a fixed width or height.
This is handy for quickly resizing a directory full of images before you upload them to your favorite social media site, listing them for sale, or emailing them to family. Smaller image sizes generally do not affect the people viewing them, only if they were going to print them, in which case you would keep the original files.
FastStone can help save you a lot of time and frustration.
For a past resize I normally use http://www.picresize.com/
But I’ll definitely be checking this out! The site sounds like it can do everything at once! Thanks for the tip
I usually use photoshop to edit my pictures, but as they say “the best things in life are free”. Sounds like a good program, sill give it a try thanks.
This is an answered prayer, we just had a family outing and everyone is excited to have their photos posted and i’m the one in charge for the uploading of gazillion photos. Hope this works.
I will definitely give this a try when. Thanks for the valuable info!
Very interesting. Would this software also be able to rotate select pictures? I always have the problem of photos being uploaded in landscape when they’re supposed to be in portrait and vice versa.
Yes you can bulk rotate photos with this software. It allows for -90, 90, 180 rotations, along with flipping horizontally and vertically. Very handy!
Thanks for the great tip. I personally use free image software, Gimp. It is basically a free version of Photoshop, which lets you do pretty much anything you want to do to images. If I have many pictures in the future, I will look into this software.
Wow this is great! I’ve always used photoshop in order to edit photos the way I see fit, but this tool is perfect for batch resizes. I really needed this about 2 weeks ago when I had to go through each photo and resize them so they wouldn’t get messed up by Facebook’s resizer.
Thanks!
When this page was loading, I was wondering if it could re-size based on percentage. And to my utter astonishment it could. This is exactly something I’d been looking for, as I often have to re-size bulk images at least twice in a month. But, with a program like this, there’s no need for me to re size with Fireworks or Photoshop manually. And like that wasn’t enough, the fear of damaging the orientation of images is eliminated with the re-size by percentage feature.
This is useful information. I used to do mine on Photoshop one by one. My friend taught me how to resize by bulk in Photoshop but I forgot how already. I’ll make sure to check out FastStone next time I have pictures to upload.
That’s pretty nifty. I’m starting a blog and am collecting pictures. It’s not hard since I’m just starting and my pictures are few but in the long run, it would be good for me to use FastStone. Thanks again for making our e-lives more manageable, hehe.
Things like these can save a lot of time. Just imagine you could go back in time and sort your “real” photographs this way in your albums. Maybe it would take some joy from it but after all it is a very good solution for the computer, especially for businesses.
I guess it is a good idea for some people, but I don’t see the use. Photos are not yet big enough where I have to worry about size (unless we’re using RAW) and I always prefer to have the original. For those who do not have a lot of computer knowledge I could see how using this would be easier than using one of the photo management programs that come with most cameras, but it’s not for me.
I like to batch process mine in photoshop or photoshop RAW. You have alot of control. Or on my mac I use preview, this is also very effective.
This is great info. I appreciate it. I have never tried FastStone Photo Resizer although I have been using FastStone Image Viewer for several years.
If anyone just wants to work with individual photos, FastStone Image Viewer is great for that. It does cropping, resizing, contrast, color adjustment, etc.and works with typical image files jpg, jpeg, gif, and others.
But again thanks for the info on FastStone Photo Resizer and how to use it. I checked out the Web site and see that it can also be used to add text and watermarks. That’s another great benefit, and to be able to do that in bulk is fabulous!
This was a great lesson for anyone new and wondering hoe to fix the size of photos to send to people or businesses. Your quick tips and tutorials can really help people out that are new to the internet.
Really useful article. I recently went for my holiday and when I came back I had about 700 pictures and no idea what to do with them and how to edit and store them.
This really sounds like a useful application and would definitely come in handy next time I’m in such a situation.
I’ve been using FastStone for quite some time and find it able to accomplish the tasks that I require of it. That being said, I will typically use a differently tool such as GIMP2 when it comes to modifying just a handful of images at a time.
Well now I have a way of quickly uploading my pictures with the proper sizes! Thank you for the information. I upload a ton of pictures to my facebook, twitter and my computer in general for my screensaver rotation. I appreciate the first comment on the article. I’ll have to give http://www.picresize.com a shot as well. You learn something new everyday.
Every time I want to re-size photos, I have to open Paint to complete that job. That gets annoying many of the times, because I have to re-size it and save them, one by one by one. This program looks like it saves an ample amount of time and quickly gets your photos to your desired size. It’s even better to hear it’s free and can also rotate photos.
I stopped editing my pictures for that same reason, resizing a picture one by one isn’t easy at all! It’s so darn time consuming and you end up hating the whole process! When I had just started editing pictures I used to have a lot fun, but after a while it got so tiring! Glad to find a software that allows you to work with big batches!
This sounds like such an awesome idea. I hate having to do everything one at a time or in small groups. It feels like it is stealing my life from me while I sit there!
FastStone Photo Resizer seems awesome because of its bulk resize utility which in case you have a folder composed of 100 or more photos (like I do) will save you SO MUCH time! I figure it will save me 10-15 minutes for each of my photo folders, so I will give it a look.
I usually just use the OS X stock Preview app for manipulating and resizing photos, but the problem there is I still need to work on images one by one. It’s easy to use but your recommendation seems a lot better. I’d need to switch to Windows for it though but I guess the time savings would still be good for bigger batches. Thanks for the heads up!
I have a program that can create multiple folders at once, and it has the ability to change the quantity of each unique name to them as well. And seeing this article on how to do massive conversion, renaming, and resizing altogether is definitely something I’m going to download for sure! I had a program that could do mass conversion, but the part that always annoyed me is still having to manually rename everything.
I can’t wait to utilize this program frequently, and thank you very much for informing us about this! This is definitely going to take organization to a whole new level, and increase the productivity of my workflow for future 3D modelling and animation. Keep it up, David!
Cool! I’ve been re-sizing a lot of photos using Photoshop but with a bit of dilly dally with the features just to make things automatic but this is pretty cool. Thanks!
Bulk photo resizing can come in handy for blogs, sites, and albums. I usually use photoshop but I know most homes probably don’t have it available. Having uniform photo sizes can really come in handy and make your work look more professional.
Thank you so very much! I’m downloading the software right now! I have a bunch of pictures I’d really like to resize, but I didn’t because I had no idea where to find a free software capable of doing that at once! So glad I read your post 🙂
This software will definitely come in handy during the holidays, that’s when I tend to take a lot pictures because the whole family always gets together around that date 🙂 I’ll definitely try it with the pictures I already have but I was too lazy to rename and resize one by one!
Awesome! I’ll definitely give this software a try, if it can actually rename pictures in batch mode and is free to use, then it definitely is worth the try! Totally awesome! One of the things I dread the most when I take pictures (apart from uploading them to the computer) is renaming them and resizing them when necessary.
As a person who does do some vacation photo organizing for family and friends, this is a very handy tool. I usually do keep the original sizes however, just because I will transfer the photos to a hard drive first, and then give it to the owners. I’ll definitely use this for my own pictures however, especially if I’m going to upload to Facebook.
I’ve always wondered how the pros do it. How do they manage the scattered files and then organize all of the memories wisely. Thanks for this tips.