How to Resize and Convert Images Quickly

This past week I found myself creating a web page of images to display in thumbnail size (150px wide), load quickly, but also resize to full size when a user clicked an image.

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Although there are other tools out there you can use, I used a free Windows program that’s been sitting in my tools folder, and does the job handily.

FastStone is a suite of software products that allow you to manage your digital images. They include:

FastStone Image Viewer (Freeware) – From viewing images to resizing and many standard features you’ll find in other image management software, Fastsone Image Viewer should be part of your imagine arsenal.
FastStone Capture (Shareware $19.95) – Screen capture software that allows you to capture full screen shots, windows, regions and other objects.
FastStone MaxView (Shareware $19.95) – Besides many of the features of the ImageView, MaxView allows you to view images of all types in many ways.
FastStone Photo Resizer (Freeware) – This handy tool allows you to convert images from one format to another as well as resize during conversion as well as other standard image management features like cropping and rotating.

But what saved me a lot of time was FastStone Photo Resizer. It’s what I used last week on approximately 50 images taken in full size from a digital camera and placed on a page.

The images were jpg images well over 1 MB each, and this led to the page loading extremely slow because it was loading the full size image and cropping each image to a thumbnail size for display purposes, and it also had to resize to its full size when a user clicked an image.

Using FastStone Photo Resizer I was able to convert all of them from jpg to gif in under 5 minutes in one fell swoop (Photo Resizer can process a whole folder of images at a time), resizing all of them to 25% of their original size, all on the fly.