How do I resize images?

[Piccolo Daimao]

I've been having a problem for a while now. I don't know how to resize images myself. Whenever I try to crop and resize an image on image-resizing websites, it always looks squashed and horrible. And I'm fed up of always asking people to resize images. So can someone help me?

[B]

Photoshop or any image resizer online. The trick is to cut off the portion you don't want. My two avatars, for example, had to be cropped before any resizing happened.

[Kaboom]

If you can't afford or otherwise acquire a professional image-editing program like Photoshop, then I'd suggest trying out GIMP, a respectable and free alternative.

[Bussani]

I use IrfanView, another free option. I...can't exactly remember why, since it has nowhere near the options that GIMP does, but it's fine for cropping and resizing.

I don't know if this is too obvious, but if you're wanting to resize something to 80x80, you should crop out a perfect square first. If your image is 500x700 pixels and you resize it to 80x80, you're going to be squishing it across its width.

[Suupaa Gohan 2]

No one really needs a big and bulky image manipulation program (Photoshop, GIMP, etc) for simple operations like cropping and resizing. If you're on a Windows machine, you've got MS Paint, and that's more than enough - it's all I've ever used for the basics like cropping, resizing, pasting screenshots, etc. No need to wait for a large multi-function image manipulation program to load up for an operation that takes about 5 seconds. If you're on Linux, the best equivalent to MS Paint is KolourPaint (in fact, it's better; I use it extensively for pixel art in addition to the aforementioned simple jobs), and I believe there are a few good 'Paint Clones' for Mac as well.

If you've got PS or GIMP and want to make use of them, go ahead, but if you don't already have such a program installed, it's pretty silly to install one just for those sorts of simple jobs, because they're full-on image manipulators, and may be larger than you want or need if all you'll be using them for are cropping and resizing images. Photoshop in particular is a huge and bulky program and just isn't going to be worth it unless you plan to make use of it for graphic design, IMO. Just use your default bundled Paint program, download one if you're not on a Windows machine (they're still going to be much smaller than GIMP or Photoshop), or see if your image viewer can handle those jobs - 9 times out of 10, it can. Just take a few minutes to read through the help files if you're confused. It's definitely not worth going out and buying/pirating (let's face it, the majority of non-professional PS users are doing the latter) Photoshop to do.

[Piccolo Daimao]

OK guys, thanks for your help!

[Bussani]

Hm, I get the feeling the old version of Paint didn't save images in great quality. That might have been why I started using IrfanView, and that just remained a habit even after MS Paint improved.

I'm probably talking about Windows 98 Paint here.