So you have a bunch of beautiful photos and you would like to share them with friends and relatives. Your options are practically endless: uploading them on your webpage so that everyone can see them, emailing the best pictures to your friends, inserting them into a document, making a nice slideshow and burning it on a CD etc. Whichever way you may choose, there is one problem you are bound to come across: your images are too large. What you need to do is resize them with a photo editing application, but you need to learn how to do this. Pictures can look different on various computer depending on the screen resolution and you need to make sure that everyone can see them properly. This short guide is aimed to help you through the process of learning how to make your photos smaller fast and easy.

Any resizing operation involves working on three things, namely the image quality, height and width. If you set these three correctly your photos will look good on any computer. Before moving forward you need to learn some basic terms about photo files:

Medium (or plural media) - this concept refers to the print (e.g. newspapers, magazines) and electronic (e.g. webpages, email) communication devices you will use for sharing your photos with the rest;

Height - this measures how tall your photo is;

Width - this measures how wide the picture is;

Quality - in simple terms, the quality of an image determines how much detail you can see in it. If you set the quality too low the photo may look blurry, while if you set it too high, you can see even the slightest detail but the size of the image file will significantly increase. You will realize that file size really matters if you want to send your photos via email or upload them to a website. Printed photos generally require higher quality while if you only plan to view the pictures on your computer you can set a lower quality level so that they do not take up a lot of space;

Aspect ratio - the simplest way to explain this term is that it represents the ratio between the width and the height of an image. When you resize a photo you need to make sure you keep the same aspect ratio as in the original, otherwise it can look stretched or skewed. Luckily you don't have to do the math yourself. Most resizing applications automatically do this for you.

The most common problems you can stumble upon after having resized a photo are images being too big, too small, looking blocky or stretched and skewed. These are all caused by a less than perfect resizing procedure and are easy to fix. If the images are too big, the problem is simple: you haven't set the width and height right. Type smaller values to make the picture smaller. In case they are to small, do the opposite. If the picture look blocky it is either because the quality level is too low or you've decreased its size to much. Work with the quality level and with width and height and your image should improve. In case your picture looks stretched or skewed, there's something wrong with the aspect ratio and you need to work on that. As stated earlier, most applications have the option to keep aspect ratio when resizing. What you need to do is enable that option.

There are many image resizing applications available on the market today. Their cost ranges from free to over $600 and they all do their job if you know how to use them. However, some are easier to grasp and some are more difficult and the number of tools they include also varies. One of the best free image resizing programs you can use is Picture Resize, available for download on Pictureresize.com. This application gives you all the options you need to start, it even resizes a batch of photos at once. When you've learned more about resizing, you can upgrade to the full version which includes a lot of extra features that can become very helpful at some point. A big advantage of this application, especially for a newbie, is that it has many standard dimensions you can choose from so that you don't have to worry about the optimum size depending on the medium you will use.

As you can see, whether you want to use your photos in emails, documents or websites, the process of resizing is quite simple if you have the right tools and follow a few simple steps.