How to Batch Resize Photos with Google Picasa

Picasa 3 is hardwired for sharing via social media, blogs and email. As such, it has a few handy features for batch resizing your photos into more web-friendly file sizes so you can easily email them or share them via dropbox. In this groovyPost, I’ll show you how to quickly and easily create resized versions of Picasa photos without altering the original files for groovy sharing bliss!

Step 1

Download Picasa 3.8 (or later). It’s free at picasa.google.com.

Step 2

From Picasa, select a batch of photos. You can do this by drawing a box around the photos you want to select, or by Clicking the first photo in the series, holding SHIFT and then Clicking the last photo in the series you want to select.

Step 3

Click File > Export Picture to Folder. Or, press CTRL + SHIFT + S on the keyboard.

Step 4

Choose your export settings:

• Export location: Browse to a folder where you’d like to save your resized photos. I recommend leaving it at the default, since it’s already in Picasa’s discoverable folder structure.
• Name of exported folder: Name it whatever you like. However, if you plan on calling it “Resized,” as I intended to, you might want to spell it correctly.
• Image size: Choose Resize to and drag the slider to one of the common settings. I recommend 640 pixels. It’s decently high res, but still astronomically lower than what most digital cameras shoot in by default.
• Image quality: Leave this at automatic. There’s no need to downgrade the photo quality, since you’re already resizing the photo.
• Watermark: Optional. We’ll cover this in another groovyTutorial.

Cilck Export when you’re all finished.

Step 5

Picasa will blast your resized photos into a new folder. It goes pretty fast, but you can watch the progress in the bottom-right hand corner.

When it’s all done, you can see the new folder it created under the Exports tab on the left, if you left the export folder as the default.

Step 6

If you are curious, you can select a photo and Click View > Properties and check out the difference in file size.

In this example, we went from 972 KB—almost a megabyte—to just 88 KB. That’ll jive much easier with today’s limited data plans!

Now that you have your photos resized, it might be handy to add the resolution while batch renaming your photos. Until then, enjoy your manageably sized Picasa photos.