France in Focus

Over the past few years we have developed a passion for discovering and photographing central Nouvelle Aquitaine with an emphasis on Sud-Gironde. I get the impression that FIF has the potential to become a great place for members to share and discuss our love of France and photography but l am having a few problems posting pictures because of their size. The maximum is 256kb so l was wondering if anyone can recommend any software for reducing photos down to this size. My own solution is to resize using Microsoft "paint" but it is a bit trial and error at the moment but will keep experimenting and testing, it's also not possible on a tablet or iPhone.

On a desktop pc far away from here I once installed a lean and mean image resizer, freeware, developed by a British programmer. It looks like it has been renamed and updated, I now saw a familiar program layout named "High Quality Image Resizer" in this roundup of 13 resizer utilities. For quick and easy resizing much faster and with more options than Microsoft Paint.

I'm a Mac laptop user so resizing is very easy. I have no idea how to do it on PC or on a tablet, phone as I have neither, so I can't help there.
Seen RA's comment re sharpness on another topic, what looks brilliant on a smartphone may look less sharp when displayed on a laptop or desktop.

Blaze, indeed, even low resolution pictures can look sharp on the litte screen of a smartphone. But because the Android or iOS software performs an automatic size adjustment, even very high res pictures are still visible between the sidelines of a vertically oriented display. So for these viewers no need to compress the original photo size. And the phpBB forum software of FranceinFocus has (server side) an "auto-resize images" feature. So no urgent need in my opinion for Oldblueraincoat to spend much time on resizing. Yes, vertical dimensions can exceed your horizontal laptop screen. So I must admit: for the perfectionist there is room for some finetuning.

Ah, other phpBB forums I've used rejected oversized photos rather than auto re-size them, so that's great.

Being a longtime linux user I use Gimp 2.8 photo program, it does almost everything you need to resize, enhance, select sections etc etc.
Much more than I ever use or know how to, but there's a good tutorial on their web site.
Its a free download.
www.gimp.org
I just use it to resize for forums, to send by email etc, and to brighten up a few.
You can download it for most operating systems.

This is what I use, free and, as it says, easy.

https://www.easy-resize.com/en/

Thank you for your help and advice - unfortunately my Android tablet does no automatically adjust my picture size and they are rejected as too large. So l am giving some of the recommended apps a try
Easy resize seems to work - thanks Spardo.

@ Oldblueraincoat, once upon a time my Huawei P9-Lite - 2016, Android 6 with EMUI interface - allowed me to choose image export size. With the upgrade to Android 7 this option suddenly disappeared. There are as you already noticed many android photo resizers available from Googleplay.

Still trying to post pictures - using Easy Resize - Problem is l cannot download the App without a lot of Spam and unnecessary other rubbish.

The first ever sighting of Baby Yoda in mainland France 1873