Image Resizer is the Rare Gem That Does Precisely What It Promises
You take a great photo with your smartphone. Then, you want to use it in a blog post or an email. Point A, meet Point B.
Connecting them shouldn’t be that hard; you just need to make two changes to the image:
- Resize the photo so that it’s not a gazillion megapixels.
- Remove the metadata from the photo so that you don’t share your home address with the internet.
It shouldn’t be that hard, and if you have this one app, it’s not.
Image Resizer is a mini-app included in the Windows PowerToys collection of utilities. Like the similarly simple Mouse Utilities (which I’ve written about before), Image Resizer is a dead-simple app whose name is also its purpose.
To use Image Resizer, first you’ll need to download and install PowerToys (see this post if you want more details). This will add the “Resize pictures” action to your context menu.
To get started using image resizer, right-click a photo or a batch of photos and look for the ‘Resize pictures’ menu item. Note that if you’re using Windows 11, this may be hidden away behind the “show more options” choice in the context menu.
You’ll get the gloriously simple interface, which offers all the options you need, plus maybe one you don’t.
First, pick your preferred dimensions for your resized pictures:
If you don’t like these presets, you can customize or create your own in the PowerToys menu (see ‘Squizzare’ above).
The other options are pretty self-explanatory. The immensely-useful “Remove metadata” will strip out any unneeded information like location data or camera details:
There’s one slightly-unintuitive option: “Ignore the orientation of the picture”. If you leave this unchecked, Image Resizer will match the smaller dimension of your preset to the smaller dimension of your image.
TLDR: if you ignore image orientation on a portrait-oriented photo, you might end up with a slightly larger image than if you checked the box.
Once your options are dialed in (and image resizer will helpfully default to whatever settings you used last), click the “Resize” button and in a second or two you’ll get your downsized images.
That’s it, there’s not much more to it. Image Resizer: it resizes your images.
I know that not everyone is in the same boat, but I love this app. It makes it crazy-easy to post an image to Medium or an email newsletter, both tasks I need to accomplish every week.
It’s such a satisfying app to use because it’s built around just doing this one small task really well. I’ve used Paint.net, Photoshop, the SnagIt Editor, and the Windows Photos app to accomplish this “resize and strip metadata” workflow, but Image Resizer is the simplest and quickest of them all.
