A screen shot of PhotoRazorHave you ever wanted to reduce the file size of your digital photos? Maybe you wanted to send pictures off to friends via email but since you can't compress zip digital photos with Winzip (or other normal compression software) you were weary about sending those huge files, either because of a storage limit to the size of email attachments that you can send or that your email might exceed the storage limits of the recipiant(s). Maybe you wanted to add a photo to a presentation or documentation but didn’t want the file size to balloon out of control. Maybe you’d like to add some photos to an online service but are worried about reaching the storage limit to quickly. Why not use PhotoRazor to reduce the file size of your photos?
PhotoRazor is a freeware application that can be found at Stormdance. You can read more about it here. It is a relatively simple application that only reduces the file size of photos, so it isn’t bloated with a lot of hard to understand and use features and it is very easy to use. One recent picture that I reduced went from 589 KB down to 57.2 KB, so you can see that PhotoRazor can greatly reduce the file size of your photos.
A folder of mine opened up in PhotoRazor
After downloading and installing it, you can use the “Choose Folder” button to select the file location of your photos, found under “1.Select Photos”. The contents of your selected folder will appear on the right side of the PhotoRazor. Whatever photo you might have selected will be displayed in the center of the application. You also have the ability to rotate your photos here as well. If you move your mouse over any of the photos that are small thumbnail size on the right, a slightly larger version of that photo will pop up (you can see this in use in the second picture that I have included with this post). Next you can decide how small you want to make your picture size in the “2.Size & Quality” section of the application. As you can see I have my picture quality set at 85%. You don’t want to reduce the size so much that your picture quality suffers. Under “3.Resize & Save” you can select all of the photos in the folder to resize and to it in bulk or you can select one or some of your photos. By default PhotoRazor stores your smaller pictures in a new folder created within your original folder called “small photos”. You can change the location here if you’d like or give the folder a different name. Clicking on the “Resize Photos Now” will then create new smaller photos for you. Your new smaller photos will have the same name as the originals but with “m_” placed in front of them. Because new files are created, your originals are still in their folder and unchanged.
There are lots of reasons that you might want to have smaller file sizes made of your photos. PhotoRazor is a handy little application to do this for you that won’t cost you and arm and a leg. Have you used PhotoRazor before? What to you use to reduce the file size of your pictures? If you have any other comments, I’d love to hear them. If you liked this article, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS or email, share it on del.icio.us or on Digg and pass it on to anyone that you think might appreciate it. Thank you. :)
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