Technology for Teaching and Learning: April 2013

By Dr. Anthony Vipin

Financial Disclaimer:
The Author has no financial interests in the products mentioned in this article.

Images need to be resized to suit the needs of the screen or uploading them onto the Internet. We work with images on a daily basis for power point presentations, articles, journal publications. Not all the available image viewers allow us to conveniently do that. However, there are a host of online editors that can do just that for free. I have decided to profile one such service called PICRESIZE and there are others as well like resizepic.com, webresize.com, resize2mail.com, fixpicture.org and many more.

PicResize.com was launched in March 2005 and has become one of the oldest and most popular image editing tools on the Internet. Today, the free service has processed millions of pictures with more than 30,000 photos resized daily. PicResize.com is an easy-to-use web site that allows you to resize and edit your photos directly online. It is completely free to use. You can upload BMP, GIF, JPG/JPEG, and PNG formatted image files. Your picture file can be up to 100 MB (megabytes). The resized picture is automatically deleted from their servers in 20 minutes after resizing the picture. PicResize.com does not store the original or resized pictures after the 20 minutes. However, the only exception is if you decide to use the 'Save to Web' feature in which your resized picture will be naturally saved to their servers (as you've intended).

Steps to Edit or Resize a Picture

1. To edit a picture on your computer, you will need to select the picture file from your computer (or from your camera attached to your computer) and upload it to PicResize.com. There are 2 options, Uploading from the Computer (mention the path) or the Web (use a URL Link). You can do this by starting on the home page and clicking the ‘Browse’ button.

2. There are other options as well for Quick Resize, Multiple Picture Upload that helps you resize your pictures through the Batch Resize, however the special effects are disabled in this feature.

3. Once the picture is uploaded, you are directed to the editing screen that helps you do a variety of functions like Crop, Resize, Rotate, Special Effects and also choose the format of the final file that needs to be edited.

4. The RESIZE YOUR PICTURE functions allows you to automatically pick a percentage like 25%, 50% and 75% or you can choose a custom size. Also, the final dimensions of the edited picture are also displayed on the side for information.

5. The CHOOSE SPECIAL EFFECT feature enables you to add in different effects to the uploaded Image. There are all listed and placing the mouse over them generates a preview as well to decide the desired effect to be applied. This is a very convenient step as all the required actions can be viewed in a single screen shot.

6. The SAVE AS function allows you to pick the format of the picture like JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP. It also has an option of quality such as Good, Better, Best. Also, the maximum file size can also be mentioned and is an optional function. Once done, you can click on the Resize my Picture button to process the file for the final output.

7. The final output is available in four different options –

- View Image – You can preview your Image and then decide if you need to download it.

- Resume Edit – Takes you back to the editing page for further changes if any.

- Save to Disk – Allows you to download the Picture onto the computer.

- Save to Web – Can share with any of the social networks and also provides a direct link.

There is also an alert of AUTO CLEANUP that shows that the file is being stored for a period of 20 minutes and will be deleted after from the server.

Picresize packs a punch! An Online Freeware tool that gives you amazing options to modify and edit your Image on the go! Added an example of a file I resized with the tool with Special Effects of Spread.