Batch resizing your pics to free up some space

It’s always great to capture all those memorable moments with your camera for every family outing, birthday party or any other events.  Unless you own unlimited disk storage, you will notice that you will run out of space sooner or later, especially if you take high resolution pictures. You might choose to regularly back up your pictures on DVDs but it is always nice to have a copy of them right onto your computer for quick viewing, isnt it?

I am sure that only a few of you probably need to keep the original high resolution pictures but we all like to have the best quality shots so that we can later edit them (and crop them). So, I needed a (free) software which could batch resize all the pics, looping through all of my folders. After a quick search, I found out that IrfanView was the best suited software to do my job.

Here are the steps, once you have installed the software :

With the above resizing, an image file of roughly 1 or 1.5MB can be compressed down to 100-200Kb. Just imagine how much space you will be saving 🙂

You have perhaps noticed that I have selected the option (6) to delete the original pictures and save the resized pictures in a different folder. At the end of the conversion, the original folder will contain only those files which could not be edited. Examples might be videos files.

I can now overwrite the original folder with the one containing the resized files. Since the resized folder contains exactly the same sub folders, the resized pictures will be moved (or copied) to the original location. Your videos files will still be there.

I highly advise you to do a test first or you might end screwed up if you find that you lost some of your files. You can also choose to do a back up first before launching the batch resize. A back up which you can delete after verifying the results.

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