Picture resizing.

Can anyone recommend the best way to reduce the size of a whole batch of pictures?

We bought a digital picture frame for the mother in law for her birthday and want to put as many pics on a 2gb memory stick as possible.....

I figured the easiest way to do this would be to resize the pictures to the same resolution that the picture frame will show them in, so basically I want to copy a whole load of pictures into a seperate file on the computer, resize them all - preferably at the same time, then put them on the stick.

The resolution of the frame is 480*234 which is about 1.2mb??? per picture?? So about 1500 pictures on a 2gb stick??? Is my maths way off the mark here??

So, can anyone recommend the best way to resize lots of pictures in one batch? I have all the standard windo$e applications, and various canon applications - but have only ever used these for converting raw images, and the pictures MUST be in jpeg....

Is there even a nice free simple tool that can be downloaded from t'internet??

Do a search for 'Batch photo resizer' or similar... make sure the word 'batch' is in there though... you should find plenty of freeware ones.

The size of each picture will vary depend on what it contains and they should all be much smaller than 1.2mb (unless you keep the jpeg quality at 12, which is pointless... 8 or 9 should be plenty without losing too much detail).

IMO it's pointless putting more than about 100 pictures on display at any one time otherwise you just don't get to see them all, but that's up to you.

Do a search for 'Batch photo resizer' or similar... make sure the word 'batch' is in there though... you should find plenty of freeware ones.

 

The size of each picture will vary depend on what it contains and they should all be much smaller than 1.2mb (unless you keep the jpeg quality at 12, which is pointless... 8 or 9 should be plenty without losing too much detail).

 

IMO it's pointless putting more than about 100 pictures on display at any one time otherwise you just don't get to see them all, but that's up to you.

Cheers Minty.

There are loads out there, have you used any you could recommend or are they all pretty much the same?

Was just going to put loads of pictures on to keep it VERY simple for my technically inept mother in law, but suppose it would be just as easy to create a number of folders and Mrs WSS can load up a new folder when she goes round....

I use Photoshop or Lightroom when I do it, so no, i haven't really used any of them I'm afraid. There may be some differences in quality between them but I doubt it'll be noticeable... After all reducing in size doesn't need anything too complicated, unlike upsizing a picture.

Is it just me or was it inconceivably complicated to do a batch resize in Photoshop?

If you have MS Office, check to see if you have Picture Manager installed in Office Tools.

http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm

its free and easy to use either in single mode or batch mode.

Do a search for XP windows power tools. MS has an image resizer tool for easy download. Once installed, rightclick on an image and the option is fourth down. Just select all images for batches. I am sure Photoshop will give you better quality results but for use in a digiframe, this might be sufficient.