Batch Image Resizing for Anyone

I had a request today to set up a Sharepoint site on our network to publish photos of internal events. Sharepoint has a rudimentary photo gallery, so we figured that’d suffice. But then we got stuck on adding the right permissions and, well, Sharepoint is never easy.

Anyways, these are typically photos straight of a digital camera and these days, that means JPGs that are several MBs in size. No need to upload all those MBs for on-screen viewing, so I thought I’d track down a simple image resizer that the folks in charge of uploading the images could use.

I spend several minutes hitting the download.com and like sites finding a variety of semi-useful options that may or may not have included spyware or nagware. Picassa was considered and was about to try that out and then someone pointed me to Microsoft’s own freebie resizer. This is one of those products that reminds you that Microsoft can do really great stuff when their marketing department isn’t involved. Once installed, this app allows you to select one or a whole group of photos and then just right-click on them to resize them en masse. It does one thing and it does it well!