Picasa Tutorial - Resize Image

Before you put a photo on your website you need to make it smaller. Your digital camera takes pictures with a huge meagpixel number so that you can print those images to make photographs. The internet is completely different and it doesn't need huge pictures to look good. What you will learn in this Picasa Tutorial is How to resize images for your website. Click on any of the images below to enlarge them.

This tutorial was originally created for our clients but it proved to be so useful that we have published it for everyone to use.

If you do not yet have Picasa, you can download it for free from Google's website: http://picasa.google.com/download/index.html
Note: Picasa does not work on Mac at the time this Picasa Tutorial was published - you must have Windows or Linux.

Resize Your Image

1. Copy your image file from your digital camera or email attachment into a folder on your computer that you can easily find. We recommend using your Desktop or My Documents.
    
2. Open the Picasa program and let it scan the folder(s) that your photos are in.
    
3. Find the photo you want to edit by browsing the image folders in the right pane. Use your mouse to select the photo and click "Enter" on your keyboard or right-click the photo and select "View and Edit" from the menu. See the illustration below.
   
   
   
   
   
4. If you have successfully selected the photo you will see this screen with your picture in the right pane of Picasa.
   
   
   
   
5. Export the photo to a folder on your computer.
   
   Click File and then choose Export Picture to Folder
   
   
   
   Here is where you finally get to resize your photo!
   Click Browse to select the folder you want to put your new, resized image in.
   
   Choose "Resize to:" under the Image Size Options heading. Either use the slider to choose a preset default image width or simply type in your own width as a number. Generally you want to set the JPEG Setting image quality to 80%. That is best combination of image quality and smaller file size so it's easier to email or viewing on websites but still looks good. (All of the images on our website are set to 80%)
   
   
   
   Your webmaster may have told you to use thumbnail photos that are 100 pixels wide. If that is the case, then type 100 into the white box next to "pixels". Most people are not familar with pixels or how they work so we created this helpful diagram to let you decide which size is right for you.
   
   A pixel is just a tiny square that is a solid color. Every digital photo is made up of thousands or millions of these tiny squares called pixels. When all of the pixels are all shown next to each other, they produce a great picture.
   
   
   Note: If your picture is a Portrait landscape (vertical photo) then the pixel number (i.e. 640) will be the photo's height in pixels instead of its width in pixels. Also, the default Picasa slider settings are going to be slightly higher than the actual pixel size that results. Landscape (horizontal) photos do export correctly with the default Picasa pixel sizes.
   
   
6. You're all done! Email your newly resized photo to everyone and they won't complain about the filesize being too big and clogging up their email or that the picture is "zoomed in" all the way. Now you can explain to them that by reducing the pixel size, you can make your photos smaller and easy to send to friends or use on your website.
   
   
   In our next Picasa tutorials we explain how to Crop Photos or Adjust Color and Lighting!