Resizing Images for Text Messages

Utilizing the text message feature within the L3 system can be quick and easy.  Adding images to text messages is a wonderful feature to spice up the text message for your audience.  However, an image’s size can negatively impact the system’s performance and user experience.  It is recommended to use small file sizes for images.  This article is intended to demonstrate how to resize images to ensure small file size.

There are numerous software applications than can resize images including GIMP, Photoshop, and ImageMagick.

Today we will be resizing images using the Image Resizer PowerToy Clone.  The is a free software application that runs on several versions of the Windows operating system.  The article assumes you have downloaded and successfully installed the PowerToy clone.

Using the software is very simple.  Open up the original images in Windows Explorer.  The screen shot below shows the files used in this article.

The file sizes are all greater than 3MB. Using this file size would result in poor performance and the end user experience would not be optimal.  Simply changing the dimensions (height and width) on the original image file after uploading your file in a text message will result in an image appearing smaller, but will not reduce its size.  Therefore, the image will appear small, but have the performance characteristics of a large file.

We will now demonstrate how to reduce the size of the first image darby.jpg that is 4.4MB. Right click on the filename, in this case darby.jpg, and select the Resize Pictures option from the drop down.

Selecting Resize Pictures from the context menu will bring up the following options.  I have selected the advance button in order to show all the options.  I suggest selecting a custom size.  It will take some trial and error to determine the  custom size that works best for you and will depend on your camera.  I am using 300 X 306 here.  Make sure you check both the Make pictures smaller but not larger option and Resize the original pictures.

Note:  Resize the original picture will overwrite the file so always have a backup of the originals.

Finally, select the ok button.  Selecting the ok button will resize and shrink the file size of the original.  You can see from the following screen shot that the darby.jpg was redued from 4433KB to to 44KB.  This is a dramatic reduction in size and it is highly recommended to use this approach to file size.

The resulting image has acceptable image quality, but now has the added benefit of improved performance.

This technique can also be used on a batch of images.  If for example you have a set of new employees’ pictures, you could resize all the files with a few clicks of the mouse.

Follow the same process as before just select multiple files from windows explorer.  Select the first file.  Next hold down the shift key and select the last file.  This assumes you selecting a block of files.  You can select random files by holding down the ctrl key and clicking each file name.

Next select the Resize Pictures from the context menu.  You get the context menu by right clicking on the selected file names.  Finally, select the same options as previously discussed and press the ok button.

As you can see from the following screen all the files were resized using the batch method.

Resizing images can be done quite easily.  After performing these steps a few times, it takes only a few seconds to transform a whole batch of images.

This article demonstrated one of numerous ways an image file size can be reduced.  We hope you have found this helpful.