How to Resize Pictures for Your Digital Photo Frame

If you do not want to print your pictures on paper, then you can use a digital photo frame. Digital photo frames not only save your money on printing costs, but are also very nature friendly (as you do not have to use paper). I, myself, have recently bought a ViewSonic digital 7-inch photo frame. Now I keep all my pictures inside this device and they keep showing in the digital display. It looks great on my desk. But it has only 7 inch display screen, so if I copy high-res pictures to its SD card, it will only take the memory card space. Instead, I resize the pictures down to 800×600 size so they display very good in the digital frame and take the minimal space on the memory card. Because each picture takes smaller space, I can copy more pictures to the digital photo frame’s memory card. You can also put thousands of your family pictures into your digital photo frame using this technique.

If you want to resize pictures so they can fit in your digital picture frame and to maximize the use of digital frame’s memory, then you can use many different resizing tools available on the internet. Here are some of the popular tools and how you can use them:

1. IrfanView

IrfanView is a very popular and lightweight picture viewer. It can open and save many different kinds of image formats. It comes with a batch resize and rename option which you can use to resize your images. Here is how.

1. Open IrfanView. Press B on your keyboard to open the Batch Conversion window.
2. Select Batch Conversion from the list of actions. Change the output format to JPG/JPEG format. Select Use advanced options and click on the Advanced button.
3. This will open another window. Here you have to select RESIZE and choose a new size e.g., 800 x 600 pixels. Do not select CROP. You can also choose many other effects like turning your pictures into gray scale, flip them horizontally or vertically, auto adjust colors etc. Click OK to save the settings.
4. Back into the Batch Conversion window, you have to select all the picture files that you want to resize. You can select a folder in the top-right folder view and then click on the Add All button to all the images inside that folder.
5. Select an output folder, where all the resized images shall be placed.
6. When you are ready, click on the Start Batch button to start the conversion/resizing process. When the process is complete, you can check the output folder and copy them to your digital picture frame.

2. Oscar’s JPEG Thumb Maker

Oscar’s JPEG Thumb Maker is a software designed specially for resizing the JPEG images. It can only take the JPEG images unlike the IrfanView image viewer. The name of this software is a little confusing as it can resize the images to larger or smaller size. Here is how you can use it to resize the images:

1. Run Oscar’s JPEG Thumb Maker. Select the folder that contains the JPEG images that you want to resize, it will show you the total number of JPEG images inside that folder. Select the output folder as well.
2. You can select the output image resolution to anything you want, e.g., 800×600 pixels. There are many other options like JPEG quality (above 80 is pretty good), retain EXIF data etc. There are rules which define how your pictures shall be resized.
3. When you are ready, you can click on the big Start button and it will go to work right away. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can alter options and try again.

There are many other resizing tools and many other image viewers which come image resize functionality, but the above two programs work the best without requiring any runtimes or .NET framework. The IrfanView program is a little complicated to work for resizing, but offers lots of options and works with all image types. The Oscar’s JPEG Thumb-Maker is simpler to use, but can work only with JPEG images and does not provide many options.

You can download Oscar’s JPEG Thumb Maker from http://www.mediachance.com/ and IrfanView from http://www.irfanview.com/.