Our team are finding that schools (and probably most people) are taking thousands of high quality digital pictures. Often these pictures are used for nothing more challenging than screen based tasks (desktops, Powerpoint, web sites) and they really don’t need to be that massive!

Microsoft has a fantastic free download called Image Resizer – this is free and works on Windows XP. The download is here (please note that this link takes you directly to the file – choose save as to save, and install later, or install to install it directly from the web)

http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe

A very hand set of instructions are available here

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/tips/eschelman2.mspx

I would add a note to Marc’s brilliant descriptions – if you are going to use ‘resize originals’ option, then make a copy of the pictures at full image size – and resize that copy. Then when / if you’re happy delete the originals or better still move them to archive