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PRODUCT REVIEW
A free tool to resize eBay and blog pictures
By David Gewirtz
Last week, I showed you a great Microsoft Office tool for preparing your images for eBay or your blog. This week, I'm going to show you another Microsoft tool that's even easier to use -- and is completely free.
Image Resizer is what Microsoft calls a PowerToy. PowerToys are wonderful, unsupported little hacks that many of us use on a daily basis. Perhaps the most common and well-known is TweakUI, which will adjust many of your system's settings. If you haven't played with TweakUI, you definitely should
In any case, one of those PowerToys is Image Resizer, which is a free download from Microsoft (at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx).
Once you've installed it, the program is incredibly easy to use. From an Explorer window on your desktop, simply select one or more images, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
 
Select Resize Pictures from your right-click menu. Roll over picture for a larger image.
Right-click, and choose Resize Pictures from the context menu. Once you've done that (and my context menu in the screen shot above has a pile of other features -- ignore everything by the Resize Pictures command), you'll get the dialog box presented in Figure B.
FIGURE B
 
You can choose a preset or enter your own size. Roll over picture for a larger image.
As you can see, you can select a pre-determined size (for eBay, I like 640x480), you can enter your own size, and you can give Image Resizer some instructions on when and how to resize.
Once you click OK, you'll have resized images.
It's just that simple. And, hey, simple and free. What more could you ask? Since it's free, it's easy, and it works, we give it a you-get-more-than-you-pay-for four out of five stars.
OUR RATING: 4 of 5
David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.
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