Luckily, storage space is really cheap these days. Even two-terabyte hard drives are available for $100 or less. Storage space for these pictures isn't much of an issue but other uses can be a problem. Did you ever try to post one of those huge images on a web page? How about sending a dozen or more photographs to a relative by using email? Huge images don't work so well in the online world.
The obvious answer is to resize the images. That is, make them smaller with less resolution. You probably will want to keep the original large image on your own hard drive but make smaller copies to be shared with others. Luckily, that is easy to do.
Almost every photo editing program, such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, will resize pictures. If you only have one or perhaps a few pictures to resize, you can use any of these programs as they will do a great job. However, what should you do if you want to resize dozens of photographs?
Most of the photo editing programs allow you to resize photos one at a time. That is, they do not have a "batch mode" to "resize all the photos in this folder." There are a few exceptions, but most photo editing programs will only handle this task one at a time. If you have 50 or 100 or more photos to resize, that can mean a lot of tedious mouse-clicking.
Luckily, there are several solutions. One that I have been using lately is iResize for the Macintosh. It is a simple program to use: give it a list of images to resize, tell it what size you want the finished photos to be, and also tell it where to save those resized photographs. Then click on SAVE, and all the photographs on the list get converted and saved. The thing that impresses me is the speed: iResize can resize dozens of photographs in five or ten seconds.
iResize will also save the photographs in any of a number of formats: JPG, JPG 2000, MacPain Image, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, QuickTime, SCI, TIFF, Truevision TGA, and even Windows BMP format. At least one of those formats should work for you.
Best of all, iResize for Macintosh is available free of charge.
For more information, or to download iResize for Macintosh, go to http://www.daniele.ch/downloads.html
How well does iResize work? Take a look at my photographs from the 2010 Southern California Genealogy Jamboree at http://blog.eogn.com/photos/2010_jamboree/. All of those photographs were resized using iResize. Converting all of them required less than five seconds on a 27-inch iMac.
