Resizing images with The Gimp

When preparing images for the web or for projection, you will usually have to reduce the resolution. Website images are typically less than 750 pixels wide and 600 pixels high.

Resizing images is a destructive process: if you reduce the resolution you can never get it back, so copy the image file first.

Open the image with Gimp, and select Scale image from the Image menu:

Now type in the width or height that you want. If you leave the chain linking the width and height boxes then the one you have not modified will be set automatically to preserve the shape of your image:

Now you can use the File menu to save the image. If you did not take a copy earlier, you may prefer to use Save As to choose a new name for the file.

Make sure that you save the image as JPEG, and select a quality appropriate to the job: most images for the web are OK at 70%. Increasing the quality too far can make the files very large and slow to load.

-- AndrewFindlay - 01 Dec 2008