When I go through the tags and look at some posts, I notice that lots of people - especially newer members - insert images in their posts without modifying them. Of course, many people here are not graphics savvy, so its like a copy and paste thing for them. But when it comes doing it the right way, most images require some retouching especially the size and appearance to make them look really nice.

Why do I need to resize my images?

Well, most images are gotten online and come in a particular size - length and width. The size of a particular image may be too big or small. In this tutorial, I will focus on resizing a big image to a smaller size suitable for a blog post. You probably have seen a picture too big to be used in a post - some people use them like that anyway. For people with no graphics experience, we will see how to use a simple available tool to resize any image.

Who are the target audience for this tutorial?

While everyone can benefit from this write up, dummies are the main target. By dummies I mean people with no knowledge of graphics. I will use a very simple tool to demonstrate this presentation. Professionals use various tools like photoshop to edit their graphics. That is a bit beyond ordinary people.
The program I will use to demonstrate this tutotrial is called Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite. So if you have installed Office, just search for this program from your start menu, run it and follow along.

How to resize an Image Office Picture Manager?

1. Goto pixabay.com. Click on any image of choice to open it. Right-click on the image and select "copy image". (see image below)

1. Open Microsoft Office Picture Manager and paste the copied image in the program. (Note: Am using version 2007 for this tutorial)

1. Double-click the image to open it fully for editing. (see image below)

1. Click on "edit pictures" button on the menu bar. (see image above)

2. From the menu items on the right, click, "Resize"

3. Check the "custom width x height" button. This option lets you resize either the height or width. If you insert any figure for the new height, the program automatically adjusts the width and vice versa.

Note: For the image am working on, the original width and height (in pixels) is 1606 by 1104. I will resize it to 800 by 450.
So when I select "custom width x height" and type 800 for the width, Picture Manager automatically adjusts the height to 550.
So now that I have gotten the desired width (800), I need to adjust the height too. Since the image has extra spaces, I will use the crop tool to adjust the height.

1. Click on "edit pictures" again and select "crop". Four handles appear around the image. Now our target is to reduce the height to 450. So to do that, I need to click, hold and drag the handle from either the top or bottom side. As I do so, I need to watch the width of the new size to stop at 450. (check the image below). Once I arrive on the desired size, I click Ok.

With this method, I have arrived at the desired size size of 800 by 450.

Why 800 by 450?

The first picture on any post is the preview image. Most people fail to realize that there is a predefined size by steemit for the first image. The dimension is height 450 while the width is 800 pixels. So always ensure that your first image has this dimension. Otherwise, steemit default configuration of 800 by 450 may skew up your image.

Conclusion

This is an easy way to resize your images. If you have any questions or further assistance, I am willing to help.

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