Have you ever been trying to put a photo into your WordPress Media Library and gotten a message saying your picture is too big? Or have you snapped the perfect selfie for your social media profile, only to be told your file size is too large? Finally finding the right photo and not being able to use it is frustrating — especially if you don’t have an image resizing application like Photoshop.
Here at Infomedia, we use Photoshop to resize, retouch and edit photos. Our designers are pros at getting the pictures looking just right for the websites we build. But Photoshop is an expensive tool, and it’s not worth purchasing the entire suite if all you want to do it resize a photo now and then.
We’ve found it strangely difficult to find a free photo resizing tool that we like, but we finally have one to recommend — PicResize. It works, it’s free, and it can upload large-format photos (up to 100MB) in the first place (lots of the free photo resizing tools we found had a small upload limit, which kind of defeats the point for us). You can also use this free photo tool to crop images — you can draw a box around the piece you want to save, or you can choose a custom size to crop to in case you have specific size limitations for your photo (for example, if you’re using it for a slider on your website).
Here’s how it works:
Upload Your Photo
Click the Browse button and it will allow you to search your computer for the image file. If you’ve received the image in an email or Dropbox, you’ll have to download it to your computer first.
Once your image is uploaded, click the yellow Continue arrow.
Rotate and Crop Your Picture (If Desired)
To the left of your photo, you’ll see a Crop Menu and a Rotate Menu. Use the rotate menu if your picture is sideways, upside down or backward. Use the crop menu if you’d like to change what’s showing in your picture. (To crop, first put your curser on the part of your photo you want to be the top left corner of your image; then drag down and you’ll see a box appear on your image; make that box include everything you want in your photo. When you’re happy with your selection, hit the Crop Selection button.)
Resize Your Picture
This is exactly what we want! You can choose to make your picture 25%, 50% or 75% smaller, or you can choose a resolution size — or pick a custom size. If you choose a custom size, only put in either the width or the height — you want to keep the proportions right, or your photo will look distorted. If you only put in one or the other, the program will automatically choose the correct proportion for the missing entry.
Next, the program gives you the option to choose a special effect, but we strongly recommend not doing this; for non-professionals like us, it’s very easy to go to far with a special effect. If your photo needs editing like this, we recommend you send it to Infomedia and let one of our professional designers help with your photo.
Save Your Resized Photo
We recommend you save as a JPG and choose Better for your image quality. You can leave the file size blank. Once you click to resize your image, you’ll see a few options — click Save to Disk (the floppy disk option) to save the file to your computer; from there, you can upload it to your WordPress Media Library.
If you have a photo you need to resize for your website, visit Pic Resize and get started cropping your image today! Then just upload it into your Media Library (here’s a video showing how to use your Media Library) and start enjoying beautiful new images on your website!
