How to reduce the size of a photo with Paint

Sometimes you need to reduce the size of photos on your computer to send them by e-mail to friends or acquaintances. This is necessary, for example, when we take pictures with modern digital cameras, which produce very high quality photos.

The size of photographs with the help of such cameras is very large. And basically, such pictures are necessary for their further editing and high-quality printing.

But, if you want to send any photos by e-mail just to view them on your computer, then there is no need to send large heavy files. This is especially important to consider if one of the parties does not use fast and unlimited Internet.

Conditional situation

Let's say we have unlimited fast Internet, and our friend, to whom we decided to send photos, has an expensive and slow Internet (for example, 2 rubles per 1 MB of information received).

In this case, when sending even 5 photos weighing 4 mb each. Sending a message with photos will not cause us any special difficulties. But our friend will receive this message with photos for a very long time and at the same time he will pay his telecom operator about 40 rubles.

Therefore, just to view photos on a computer is better to use before sending them by e-mail.

Reducing the size of a photo with Paint

There are many ways to reduce the size of a photo. But in this article we will look at how to do this using the Paint program, which is already included in the Windows operating system. I'll look at Paint in Windows 7 (in XP, this program works the same way).

As an example, I took a picture with my camera with a resolution of 9 mega pixels, and I got a photo of 4.35 mb in size. I will reduce the size of this photo. To do this, right-click on this file, and in the additional menu select: To open with -> paint.

The selected file is opened by the Paint program, in which the original dimensions of the photo are visible:

To reduce the size of the photo, click on the button: Resize(as shown in the picture above) and in the drop-down menu, select the change in percentage or pixels. I choose in pixels, leave a checkmark: keep proportions and resize it horizontally to 1024 (or 1280) pixels. These sizes are enough to display a photo well on any computer monitor:

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To resize a photo in Windows XP go to the menu Drawing-> Stretch and change the size as a percentage. Either on the menu Drawing-> Attributes and change the size in points, for example, as in our case described in this note: 1024 horizontally and 768 vertically.
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After resizing, the photo must be saved. To do this, we perform only 3 steps:

1. In the menu at the top in the left corner, left-click to open the drop-down list for selecting functions;
2. Hover over: Save as;
3. In the additional selection, click on: JPEG image(one of the most common formats):

Next, you need to choose a place where to save the modified photo. For example, I have the original photo (for this note) on my desktop. The file is called Photo. When saving, in order not to change the original file, I name the resized file differently (for example, Photo 2) and press Save:

Ready! Now, by the properties of the files, we see that using the standard Paint program, we reduced the original size of the photo by 10 times, moreover, when viewed on a computer, the difference in quality is not particularly noticeable:

Other functions of the Paint program

In the Paint program, you can not only resize images, but you can also draw, add text, shapes, and so on. Experiment with your photos, and if you don’t like the result of any action, you can always undo it using the undo button of the last action, which is located in the upper left part of the program window:

so, when transferring photos over the Internet, I recommend that you always check the size of the transferred photo. By the way, this can be done by right-clicking on the photo, and in the menu that appears, selecting: Properties.

If the photo is too large, you can resize it, for example, using the Paint program. To do this, open the file with this program, resize it in%, or horizontally by 1024 (or less) and save it as a JPEG.