Social notworking software

Social networking requires more than a gift of the e-gab and a cute picture folio – there’s also a bit of IT nouse needed.

Going through the backlog of emails received while I was away, I found a number of requests to hook up with people on Facebook. Going through the bits and pieces, I found that many people (mostly singles) were posting all these photos of their travels and partying. Right-oh says me, I’ll post some of my pictures from the holidays. The four year old peeing on a log – that sort of thing.

Strangely enough though, everytime I tried to upload photos the Facebook website came up with an error. Thinking about it, I decided that maybe the images were just too big. They were all high res photos around 2Mb to 3Mb each.

The obvious answer was simply to reduce the size of the photos then have another go. The pictures don’t need to be 600dpi for my screen. Yes I know my screen is measured in pixels per inch, not dots per inch, but let’s use the standard language. For standard Windows resolution, most objects are portrayed at 96dpi. Therefore my pictures are about six times too large.

The easy solution is to open up the images in Photoshop and drop down the resolution. Oops. I’m at home not work, and I don’t have Photoshop on my home computer. In fact I don’t have a copy of anything that can do this.

A quick search of the internet found a lovely free product for me called PIXresizer. This product has all the attributes I like in software.

1. Small.
2. Effective.
3. Simple.
4. Free.

In fact it was easier than doing the job in Photoshop, as I could select a whole lot of images in a directory and reduce them down in size as a batch.

I reduced 10 pictures down to 400 x 300 and uploaded them in seconds to Facebook. The PIXresizer software only works on Windows, but I’d have to say it was a great solution.

The question remains of course, why would I spend work time uploading holiday photos to Facebook? The answer to that is a different story.

Brendan Lewis is the founder of two IT service firms, Edion and Verve IT, and executive director of the Churchill Club.

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Comments

Chris Thomas from Reseo writes: Great tool, thanks! You’d think Facebook would simply automatically resize your photos during upload. I seem to remember Yahoo photos doing a good job at this a while back. Another free online resource I love is https://www.picnik.com. They have super image editing software, all online. Almost as good as Photoshop itself! Well nearly almost.