Irfanview is a free and very basic photo-editing program. I use it regularly to resize photos. This comes in handy if you want to email photos or upload them to a photo sharing website. Irfanview can work with just about any photo file you have (.jpeg, .gif, .bmap, .ico, .tiff, etc). I’ve written a quick tutorial about how to use Irfanview to reduce the size of a photo.

OPen up Irfanview, and go to the Menu where it says “File” (you know, File, Edit, Image, Options, etc). Click that, and a dropdown menu appears. Choose “Open.”

A new window will pop up, asking you what you want to open. Find the picture you want (let’s pretend you have a photo of a white house on the Desktop). You’d go to the Desktop until you see whitehouse.jpg. Choose that one. The photo should open in Irfanview.

Here’s our whitehouse.jpg photo. See how large it is? It’s 1415 x 949 pixels!  This is too large a photo to email or post on a blog. It consumes a lot of space and bandwidth, and makes the person viewing/receiving the image use up their bandwidth.

Now, go to where it says “Image” in the menu bar. A menu will drop down. Choose “Resize/Resample.”

A new window will pop up, asking you what size you want. For now, since you are new, you can choose something easy like “Half.” Obviously, this will make your picture twice as small. In this example I opted for the “Set new size” and typed in width 500 pixels and height 375 pixels; this is a good, general size for most blogs and photo uploads. For emails, you may even want to make it a little smaller.

Click “OK.” The picture will immediately change. See below for our newly-sized photo.

Now you need to save the newly sized picture. If you want to make your photo of whitehouse.jpg permanently this small, choose “Save.” HOWEVER if you want to keep that larger picture of the white house for your own files, but want a smaller version in your email or uploaded on the web, choose “Save As” and rename the photo (for example, “whitehouse_small”). This will give you two photos of the white house in your computer– your original large photo and a new smaller photo.

Irfanview by default saves the images as jpeg image files. As you become a more advanced user, you can tinker with settings and make all sorts of files.

You can even use Irfanview to sharpen the image, remove red-eye, tint the colors, and do all sorts of nifty things. Explore with the menu items. Be sure to work on a “scrap” image and not one you want to preserve, in case you make a mistake.

Smaller images are much better for sending email. They also won’t annoy the email recipient, who hates getting gargantuan images! Smaller images are easier to upload. If you have a blog, this is very important. Some blogs I visit have enormous images in them, and my browser stutters and skips to display them. It is thrifty and courteous to compress your images. Use Irfanview, it’s free!