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[Other Tutorials: Cropping Images] Why Use XnView? I'm going to show how to resize a picture (pic) with XnView because XnView will do it and because XnView is free. Normally I use either Adobe Photoshop or JASC Paintshop Pro to work with images. The JASC and Adobe products are not free, XnView is. You can hop over to the homepage and download your very own copy. Why Resize Pics? Two reasons why you want to resize images your going to post to the web and both have to do with sizes. The overall image size is generally measured in pixels. For a signature picture on the forum you generally want to stay in the 400x400 range. The second size issue has to do with the filesize. With today's digital camera's it is quite easy to take a picture that is 5mb or larger. This makes for a long day for those poor soles stuck with dialup connections to wait for your image to transfer to their computer. For the most part you should be able to create a decent web-suitable picture that is under 50k. Here is the information for the picture we are going to resize, this information can be displayed with XnView: As you can see the image is 621K or just about 1/2MB, you can also see that the pixel size is 2048x1536. That is way too large to throw up on a webpage, and at 2048x1536 it is also, most likely, too large to display on your computer screen without having to scroll from side-to-side. ![]() Since I resized the original image for this page from 2048x1536 down to 350x263 you can now see that the filesize was also reduced from 621k to just over 13k. That is a huge reduction and means that the picture should load about 600% faster (give or take a few %). |