A client recently bought a brand new digital camera and wanted to have a quick and easy way to resize the photos and make them more suitable for email.

Luckily, Microsoft has released a series of small programs for XP that they have strangely named PowerToys. One of these PowerToys is built exclusively for resizing images. After you download and install the program you’ll be able to instantly resize any image on your computer by right clicking the file and selecting “Resize Pictures” from the menu.

You’ll be presented with a selection of image sizes (or you can define your own) and when you are ready the PowerToy will make a resized copy of your original image in the same directory. You can resize multiple images by selecting multiple files and going through the same process.

For a web developer, if your client doesn’t have access to an image editing program or any interest in learning how to use one, the Image Resizer PowerToy is a great way for XP users to avoid a little heartache in preparing web-ready images.