I was disappointed to see that windows 7 does not include a simple utility to resize / reduce pictures straight out of the box.
Believe it or not this feature has been hidden in the operating system since at least 2002 (right click a photo and send to email recipient offers ‘make smaller’ for emailing). But ask any IT professional & this is a strange way to access such a useful feature.
As usual the solution has to be free, easy to use and as unobtrusive as possible. Normally this would never point to a Microsoft product but this time it does.
For XP users I recommend Microsoft Powertoys Image Resizer.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
For Window Vista and Windows 7 users the remake is available from Codeplex;
http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/
Both utilities offer the ability to right click a photo and select from several reduced sizes.
Now if it could just offer basic file format conversion e.g. gif to jpg it would be perfect. As is this is still an excellent utility.
