For the post on the Williamsburg trip I wanted to take the pictures that Mom and Carol had taken and shrink them down to something appropriate for a web page. I also wanted to handle all of the pictures as a batch, so I didn’t have to open each one individually, resize it, and then save again. I visited download.com and found a highly rated (5 stars by the editors, 4.5 stars by the users) free image editor called FastStone Image Viewer that can handle batch conversions like that. I believe this is the same viewer that I had loaded on Susan’s computer when I had to crop some files. With my copy of Lview Pro (shareware I paid for in the 90’s) getting pretty old, lately I’ve been using the very basic image editor that comes with Microsoft Office, but with the switch to Office 2007, they ruined the program. For instance, I don’t even know how to use it to open a picture file. The obvious menu location, File:Open, is not available.
FastStone is kind of complicated for what it does with some funky screens and previews. But after making copies of the pictures I wanted to use on the gallery web page in a single folder, FastStone made new copies in a subfolder that were resized perfectly.
I thought most photo management software (we use iPhoto) allows you to export a collection of photos and size them all down. For instance, in iPhoto, I just say export and choose “Medium” size. But I can also say “Size no greater than 1024 high or 1024 wide.”
iPhoto doesn’t work on PC’s. Windows doesn’t have a good built-in photo manager. Sometimes the software that comes with a digital camera will do it, but not all that well.