Some of you guys & gals,who are like me, are dummies when it comes to picture editing , but over the weekend I have learn some neat basic tricks to help me re-size and crop the picture I want, and there is actually a few ways to do it!

Thanks to having 2 different computers, one at home and another at the office with different versions of windows, I was able to learn how to re-size and crop pictures on both windows XP and Vista, for those of you using Mac, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you there, you’ll have to find help somewhere else, since i don’t own a Mac

Resizing your photos
It’s important to re-size your photos because, the size of your photos fresh out from your cameras usually around 1.5MB ~ 5MB, if you try to upload these pictures one by one to your website it will be horrendously long , and frankly quite time consuming.

Besides saving you loads of time from uploading your pictures, resizing your photos also helps you save storage space.

Not to mention you’ll be doing your website visitors a big favor by shortening the load time of your website. Most visitors won’t be bother to wait for your 1.5 MB product pictures to load, so my advice is to keep your pictures sizes to a maximum of 150KB each, so it will only take seconds to load your pictures not minutes!

Cropping your photos
Learning how to crop photos can be a great help when you are trying to get rid of the background on your photos. What you want your visitors to focus on is usually just your product and not the surroundings of your bedroom

Cropping photos can also help reduce the size of your photos, so that sometimes you don’t even have to resize your pictures! Maintaining the quality of the photos and at the same time making sure the size does not exceed the advised 150KB limit.

Caution! Before editing your pictures, please be advised to make a copy of the original , so if anything is messed up, you still have the original as a backup.

Resizing pictures on Windows XP with Image Resizer

If you are using windows XP service pack 2, chances are you already have image re-size installed on your PC, if you don’t you can download Microsoft’s Image Resizer as part of their power toys application for free.

Download Microsoft Powertoys

• Your re-sized picture will be in the same folder as your original folder with the file name “[Original file name](Small)”
• You can also do batch resizing using this method.

Crop & re-size pictures on Windows Vista with Microsoft Office Picture Manager

For those of you using windows Vista, sad to say that the power toys application is only for windows XP, but if you Microsoft office 2003 chances are you already have Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Crop & re-size pictures using Picasa 3.0 by Google

The great thing about Picasa 3.0 is its amazingly small size for the features it provides, it is only 9.6 MB to download and the best part, it is FREE, and you know how a lot of us likes free stuffs

Download Picasa Google

2.62 MB into 124 KB! Woot, which is less than 150 KB, so people surfing my website won’t complain on slow loading!