ictsan

Thanks to I King for this contribution;

Batch resizing of photos can be done with:
Picasa (free from Google)

Microsoft image resizer – free from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

picturetray – free from here:
http://www.picturetray.com/

or pixresizer – free from here:
http://pixresizer.en.softonic.com/

I just blogged about the need to resize digital photos.

Here are some more solutions I’ve found for this tricky problem. These are tools that you are likely to be able to access in schools.

1) Use Microsoft Picture Manager. There is a detailed worked example here from the educationict website.

2) If you are using an RM network and have Colour Magic available, this can be used. There is an excellent help-sheet, again on the educationict site; here

3) Find an on-line web resizing service. Webresizer http://webresizer.com/, seems to be very useful. It has an easy to use cropping tool, and you can change contrast, ‘exposure’ and colour saturation, although these effects  are a bit tricky to use as you have to enter values rather than drag sliders.

Here’s a photo that I cropped, brightened and reduced its size. It of my favourite camera for work in schools; the Mavica FD 200 with memory stick. Still going strong! The picture is 93% smaller than the original, so webresizer tells me. It has also made a good job of the play people, though the upload time of this large file was longer than I expected.

I am still open to any other ideas! Please add a comment.

Digital cameras seem to boast more and more megapixels!

That means they are getting better and better doesn’t it. Well yes, for professionals and serious hobbyists, but for most purposes in schools, we don’t need anything like that size of a picture. By size, I mean file size. This picture was sent me by an LS teacher.  She used these characters as 21st Century Borrowers, to stimulate writing in pupils with low attainment. What a great use of pupils’ imagination. The teacher compiled the group’s writing into a word document illustrated by this and other pictures.

I asked her for a copy. She was unable to send the Word document as it was too big to send from a school networked computer. What’s the answer?

There are all sorts of ways to do this. If the software you want to use is Word or Powerpoint, you need nothing more than that. In Word there is a picture compression tool. It reduced the size of this picture from 1.38Mb to 93 Kb.

Well, this picture now takes up on fifteenth of the space on a hard disc. The Word document containing this picture is now small enough to be sent as an email attachment. I used Word to crop the picture, losing unwanted border areas, made the picture lighter and gave it more contrast, and finally compressed the picture. There is a  loss of quality, but for use as picture embedded in text,  it is not noticeable.

I also used Word to export the picture for this blog. I exported my Word document as a web page called – playpeople. I then went looking for a folder called ‘playpeople_files’. I found the picture in a web-ready state.

It was even smaller! A mere 16 Kilobytes. So it was taken on a fairly new 5 megapixels camera and on this page, the file size has been reduced to less than an eightieth of the original size!

There are more sophisticated ways of doing all this. At home, I use Picasa 3, but for use in school MS Word is a useful tool for changing pictures.

I know there are other ways to reduce file size and improve pictures. I’d appreciate any comments. I’ll follow them and include them in this blog.