There are plenty of reasons to want to crop or resize an image.
No doubt you’ve had times when an image has been the wrong size or shape and we’ve needed to fix it to meet certain requirements.
There are a number of ways to do this, but the good news is you don’t need to worry about downloading extra programs or apps. There are easy and free tools you can use in both Windows 10 and Windows 11 to tweak images which are pre-installed and easy to access, so follow these steps to adjust images until your heart is content.
How to resize an image by pixel or percentage
If you need to resize an image to make it bigger or smaller either by pixel size or by percentage then there’s an easy way to do it in Windows.
It’s not immediately obvious, but the pre-installed Microsoft Photos app in Windows has the options you need to do this.
So you can just open a photo with this app and then choose to resize it into whatever size you need. To do so follow these steps:
- Open Windows explorer and navigate to the place you’ve saved your image
- Right-click on it and click “Open with” and then click “photos” to open the photos app
- When the app is open click on the three dots menu button at the top of the app
- From there click on resize image then click to choose either pixels or percentage to change the size
You can enter the size manually in either width or height and it will adjust the size automatically while maintaining the original aspect ratio of the image.
If you want to change the size but also stretch the image at the same time you can click the chain button between “width” and “height” to unlink the two fields and adjust them individually.
How to adjust the file size and compress the image
When you’ve followed the steps above to resize an image you’ll also see the option to both adjust the quality of the image and the file extension.
These options are perfect if you need to change the file size because the image you’re editing is just too big to upload to a particular site or is taking up too much room on your PC.
Naturally resizing it in terms of pixels or percentage size and making it smaller will also reduce the file size but you can also tweak the quality or file type to make it smaller too.
There’s a quality slider on the Microsoft Photos app which you can see when you’ve clicked to resize the image. Move the slider to the left to reduce the quality and you’ll see the “new” file size go down. It’s also worth trying other file extension types to see the difference. PNGs, for example, are usually larger file sizes and need adjusting.
There are other compression options worth trying too. If you find that the images aren’t small enough then you can use a tool like Compressor IO to shrink the files further. This is a free tool that shrinks the file size but maintains the quality with lossly or lossless compression.
How to easily crop images in Windows
Alongside the ability to resize an image, the Microsoft Photos app also gives you the option to crop and change the aspect ratio of an image too.
This is really easy to do and it’s a great way to make it the right size for your needs. So follow these steps to do it:
- Open Windows explorer and navigate to the place you’ve saved your image
- Right-click on it and click “Open with” and then click “photos” to open the photos app
- On the top you’ll see an “edit image” button, click that or press CTRL+E
- On the bottom of the app, you’ll then see a button marked “free” click that to start cropping
- You can then drag the corners of the image to crop it and fit a different frame
- If you want a specific aspect ratio for your image (e.g. 16:9 or 3:2) instead of free cropping then you can click that option at the bottom of the screen
- This will crop the image and then you can click to save it as a copy or overwrite the original image
Use MS Paint instead
If you find that you can’t use the above methods to resize an image, not to worry as you can always rely on Microsoft Paint. Yes, the tried and trusted app is perfect for resizing images easily.
- Open Windows explorer and navigate to the place you’ve saved your image
- Right-click on it and click “Open with” and then click Paint from the list
- When Paint is open with your image you’ll see there’s an icon in the menu section marked “Image” click that or press CTRL+W
- You’ll then see a resize and skew menu
- Here you can change the size of the image by percentage or pixel size by adjusting horizontal or vertical options
- You can also click the chain button between “width” and “height” to unlink the two fields and adjust them individually if you want to skew the images
Once you’re done click ok and then click to save the image.