Well I’ve learned something interesting and that is that Picasa can be used to resize photos. My thanks to Rebekah of Colder Weather who pointed it out.
Here is a screen shot of Creative Kit, and then the image that I resized to 600px wide. Picasa did a good job and the image is 20KB.
Update September 2013
It seems Google have discontinued Creative Kit, although the picture isn’t entirely clear. If it has happened then it is perhaps connected with the online editing in Google’s Chrome browser. That uses a native client application based on Nik software that Google bought a while ago.
I took a quick look on the forums and people are recommending Picmonkey and Picadilo as alternatives. I didn’t look in detail and I don’t know whether it’s possible to resize images using these web-based applications.
The reason I didn’t look at them in detail is that I resize photos with Photoshop before uploading them.
I would not upload a full-size version of one of my images to a third party company. Full-size images are many megabytes in size. It’s just not practical to upload them to the web for editing. And what if a company is disreputable and sells on the uploaded images? What if an employee of the company grabbed the images? What if the company was hacked?
I am not imputing any lack of ethics or poor safeguarding to either of the companies I have mentioned. However, I simply would not upload when there are desktop applications that do a very good job. Adobe Elements and Adobe Lightroom are good value for anyone who doesn’t want to get the full Photoshop capability.
Picasa is full of interesting bits: resize, sharpen, etc… won’t replace photoshop but it is very helpful
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Yes, good to know when one is on a machine that doesn’t have a program for editing images.
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Windows Live Photo Gallery is also a useful tool for simple editing
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Thanks, I’ll take a look.
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Well .. I’m glad I could contribute a little something. I’m such a creature of habit, so I always have to do certain things the same way: When I download my pics from the camera, they all go into Picasa. Then I pick and choose which ones I want to do something with in PS. Hence, Picasa is my default picture viewer.. I’ve tried Windows Live Gallery but couldn’t find the straighten-tool ..
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More than a little something – thank you 🙂
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Can someone give me the instructions on how to resize a photo in Picasa. Picasa has eliminated Creative Kit from their program – what a terrible thing they did!!! Please help.
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I am not completely sure whether the online version of Picasa has stopped, but it seems so. I posted an update to the article and mentioned some alternatives. Have you tried the downloadable version of Picasa?
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I use Picasa on the computer … I’m not sure I’ve ever used the ‘online version’, or seen it. I only use it for cropping and straightening and then I hit the EXPORT button to resize them.
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There seem to be some people who are wary of downloading the program and just want to resize photos for use on eBay etc.
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yes, if that’s the only usage, I wouldn’t download it either 🙂
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