Monday, March 22, 2010

Resize photos using iPhoto

If you're a Mac user with some photos you want to resize, or even shrink them to take up less hard drive space, you can do it with iPhoto. This does reduce the resolution of the photo, but unless you need high-res for printing out large posters or something similar to that you should be fine. If you're a Windows users then I suggest downloading Axiom PicSizer, which is a free utility that will resize individual photos, or entire folders.

To resize photos using iPhoto:

1. Open iPhoto and choose the library the photos you want to resize are in
2. Select the photos you want to resize, or you can resize the entire folder. Once you have the photos selected, move to the next step
3. Go to Share->Export...
4. Change the Format box from Original to JPG. This will also enabled the resize proportions boxes
5. Select "Scale images no larger than" and define the proportions you want to resize the photos to
6. If you want to change the names at all, look at the options on the right side and pick them accordingly
7. Click Export at the bottom
8. Choose the location you want to save the newly resized images to and click Ok. If you selected the same folder as the original photos it will overwrite those originals unless you defined some naming rules in step #6 to distinguish the resized files.

After the export finishes you should have a new set of photos that take up a lot less hard drive space. I used this last week to resize a folder of photos to a resolution of 800x600, and that folder went from 5.3GB to 180MB.

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