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Resize your website photos using Picasa
14 March 2011Picasa is free, easy to use photo editing software from Google. It works well for preparing photos for your website and these instructions show you how!
The following article refers to Picasa version 3.8 used on a Windows based computer. For later versions of Picasa, it is likely that the procedure is very similar to the steps below:
1. Install Picasa
- Download Picasa from picasa.google.com.au
- Install the software to your PC or laptop
- Open Picasa and let the software automatically index the folders, dates and photos on your hard drive, this may take awhile if you have a lot of photos
2. Get your website image ready
The following instructions (and screenshots) I have stepped through optimising a photo that was originally 2.9 mB and 2884 pixels in width. For this exercise, I would like my web page image to be only 330 pixels wide and under 20kB in file size preferably.
- Within the Picasa screen, browse to your photo folder from the list of folders displayed in the left panel, when you click on a folder, all of its containing photos will be displayed on the right hand section of the screen
- From the right hand section, double click on the image you want to optimise
- Perform any basic fixes such as cropping, straightening or brightening the image (there are easy to use tools to the left of the screen)
- You are now ready to resize and export, the original image will not be affected
3. Resize and export your image
- At the bottom of the screen, click the export icon and a popup box will appear (screenshot further below)
- Click 'Browse' and choose a folder for your edited image
- Give your new folder a name
- Click 'Resize to' - for the Image Resize option
- Enter the exact pixel width that is required for your web page, the size will depend on where you are placing your photo. In this example (screenshot below), I have entered 330px
- Select 'Minimum' for image quality - its important for web images to be compressed so their file sizes are as small as possible without losing too much quality
- Leave the remaining settings and click the 'export' button at the bottom of this screen - the image will be saved to the directory you chose beforehand, and the directory will open so you can check the file size
4. Check your image and you're done!
- Check the exported image and ensure you are happy with the quality. If Picasa has compressed it too much (and it looks a little too grainy), you can repeat the previous steps and select 'Custom' instead of 'Minimum', you could try about 75 (percent) and re-adjust as necessary.
- You will notice the filesize is now nice and tiny (great for a fast loading web page). In this particular example shown in the screenshot below, you can see that my new file size is a very web friendly 13kB and the desired width of 330px.
