I upgrade to Windows Vista about a month ago via a new laptop. If I’m being honest, too date I have yet to have very many objections to the new system and I think it is nowhere near as bad as some of my fellow developers have been complaining it is. Oh well, to each his own.
I do feel that Microsoft missed the boat on one powerful feature that even Windows XP had, which is the ability to have Windows resize your images. Granted, this feature was only available for XP after you downloaded a “power tool”, but non the less, the ability to select and resize an image or group of images with a few mouse clicks is great. There is no such feature in Windows Vista and no such power tool to save the day.
What there is, is a dirty little work around that still gets the job faster than using a photo program to resize your images:
Selecting the desired images, right click and mouse over “send to”.
From the tool tip menu select mail recipient.
If this is the first time you’ve selected this, you’ll have to get up a mail account. I’m an avid gmail user sans POP, so I just put in the junk data. Once this is set up you don’t have to do it again.
Now windows will prompt you to choose if you want to scale your image size(s) down. Select your desired resolution.
Next a email editor will open with all your, now smaller, images loaded as attachments.
Select all the images and drag them out of the email into a folder or some other desired location.
Done.
Functional? Sure. An elegant solution? By no means. Faster than an alternative? Yes. And as far as I can tell there is no limited capabilities to this either. Currently I’m resizing images a few hundred at a time.
I hope that soon Windows Vista will see an update allowing this same resize functionality with out having to make it think you’re sending an email. Until then. This method will have to do.
August 3, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I’m having a terrible time trying to resize pics and was so excited to see your directions above. However, when I tried to do it, I couldn’t get account set up. I have msn and also yahoo email accounts but don’t know POP3, IMAC or outgoing server addresses. Can you help me?
August 3, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Hey Ann, I’m glad you found the post helpful. I never officially set up my email. I use a gmail account that I access from the web, so I just put in a bunch of “junk data” to get past the application’s prompts so I could start resizing my images. I’m not sure how to set either yahoo or msn off the top of my head. If you wanted to set up your msn and yahoo accounts into Windows, you should check the help documentation within those services. I also found a quick reference over at Microsoft’s website you can visit here. Hopefully this helps.