Dealing with photos often involves resizing them, whether it’s to save storage space, make them easier to share online, or fit specific website requirements. Windows 10 offers a simple yet powerful tool within Microsoft PowerToys called Image Resizer that makes this process incredibly efficient, especially when you need to resize multiple images at once. This guide will walk you through how to use this handy utility to resize your photos directly from File Explorer.
Resizing Photos Directly from File Explorer
The beauty of Image Resizer lies in its seamless integration with Windows 10. Once you have PowerToys installed, resizing images becomes a right-click away. To get started, simply select one or more image files in File Explorer. Right-click on your selection, and you’ll see a new context menu option: Resize with ImageResizer. Clicking this option opens a dialog box where you can choose your desired size.
You can quickly select from pre-defined sizes like Small, Medium, or Large, or even create custom dimensions to perfectly match your needs. Image Resizer gives you control over how the resizing is handled with options like Fill, Fit, and Stretch, ensuring your photos are resized exactly as you intend.
For even faster resizing, Image Resizer supports drag and drop functionality. You can select your images, then right-click and drag them to a folder. Upon releasing the right mouse button, you will be presented with the Resize with ImageResizer menu, allowing you to resize and save copies of your images in a new location in one swift action. This is particularly useful when you want to keep your original images untouched while creating resized versions.
Customizing Image Resizer Settings for Perfect Results
PowerToys Image Resizer is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the resizing process to your specific workflow. You can access the settings through the PowerToys settings window. Here you can define your own preset sizes, giving them descriptive names for easy selection during resizing.
Understanding Size Options: Fill, Fit, and Stretch
When setting up your preset sizes, you’ll encounter three options: Fill, Fit, and Stretch. Understanding these is key to achieving the desired resizing outcome:
- Fill: This option ensures the resized image completely fills the specified dimensions. To achieve this, Image Resizer scales the image proportionally and crops any excess parts that don’t fit within the target width and height. This is ideal when you need images to be exactly a certain size and don’t mind some cropping.
- Fit: Fit mode prioritizes showing the entire image within the specified dimensions. It scales the image proportionally to fit within the target width and height, without any cropping. This might result in whitespace (letterboxing or pillarboxing) around the image if the aspect ratio of the original image doesn’t match the target dimensions. Choose Fit when you need to see the whole image and maintain its original proportions.
- Stretch: As the name suggests, Stretch mode stretches the image to completely fill the specified dimensions, regardless of the original aspect ratio. This option does not maintain proportions and can distort the image if the target dimensions are significantly different from the original image’s aspect ratio. Stretch is generally less preferred for photos unless distortion is intended for artistic effect.
Advanced File Naming and Fallback Encoding
Image Resizer also offers flexible file naming options. You can customize the names of your resized images using parameters that include the original filename, the selected size name, and the dimensions. This allows you to automatically organize and identify your resized images easily.
In situations where an image format isn’t fully supported for saving, Image Resizer provides a fallback encoding option. This ensures that your image can still be resized and saved by converting it to a more universally compatible format like JPEG or PNG. It’s important to note that this is primarily a fallback mechanism and not intended as a general-purpose image format converter.
Install PowerToys to Unlock Image Resizer
Image Resizer is a part of the Microsoft PowerToys suite, a free set of utilities designed to enhance your Windows experience. To use Image Resizer, you’ll first need to download and install PowerToys from the official Microsoft website. Once installed, you can enable and configure Image Resizer from the PowerToys settings, and immediately start resizing your photos with ease. With its intuitive integration and powerful features, Image Resizer is an invaluable tool for anyone working with images in Windows 10.
