What do you do when you have hundreds of high-res images of varying sizes that need to be added to a website as a photo gallery? That’s the question i had to ask myself when building a site for someone. Apart from eating up bandwidth, if the images are not all uniformed in size it will make for a poor user experience on the site, especially if you’re running through them as a slideshow..

Manually resizing or cropping hundreds of images isn’t an option – it would take hours. Uploading the images as they are and using css to resize them is a lazy way out – it’s not good practice…. the images will be slow to load for users & they’ll eat up bandwidth for both user & server.

After a bit of browsing i came across an application called ‘PhotoResize400‘. It’s free.

That will automatically resize photos to a width of 400px, height of 300px.

What happens if you want other sizes or more control? Download this little app called Photo Options EX (pictured above). You can compress the images to a certain filesize or just resize them to any dimensions you want. Very handy tool to know about and worth having on your PC

Simply throw some photos in to a folder… tell this app to resize that folder and it’ll run through every image and then put all the newly created images in a subfolder in the folder that contains all the original images.

This is one of the reasons why i love working under pressure – it forces me in to working smarter and this little application has probably saved me about 3 or 4 hours work.