Image Resizer: shrink photos with a right-click

A photo off today's phone can easily be over ten megabytes — and you want to send ten of them. Email rejects it, the web form rejects it, so you open an image editor and shrink photos one at a time. The Image Resizer module from the free PowerToys suite removes that whole middle step: shrink photos in bulk right in File Explorer, via right-click, in a few seconds.

How to do it

1. Install PowerToys (Microsoft's free toolkit) and confirm the Image Resizer module is turned on.
2. In File Explorer, select one or more photos, right-click, and choose the Resize pictures option (on Windows 11 you may need to look under Show more options).
3. Pick a size from the preset profiles — small, medium, large — or enter a custom pixel dimension.
4. Leave “make a copy” checked: the resized versions save alongside the originals with a size suffix in the name, and the original photos stay untouched.
5. Confirm — even a batch of dozens of photos finishes in moments. Define your own size profiles (say, “1200px wide for web”) once in the PowerToys settings, and they stay in the menu permanently after that.

A typical scenario

After a school project, a teacher is sending photos to parents. Thirty photos at eight megabytes each won't fit in an email even split into two batches. Instead of uploading to storage and explaining how parents get to them, she selects the photos, right-clicks, picks medium size, and sends the shrunk copies — a quarter of a megabyte per photo is plenty for viewing on a phone.

A marketer, meanwhile, prepares images for the web every week: photographed material that needs a consistent width. One custom profile in Image Resizer, and the whole batch is ready in two clicks — no editor to open.

What you get out of it

• No more rejected attachments: photos go through email and web forms on the first try, because you shrink them before hitting the limit.
• Time: bulk resizing replaces opening an editor for every single photo — minutes become seconds.
• Safe originals: the default mode makes copies, so full quality for print or archiving is never lost.
• Lighter load for recipients: smaller photos download and open faster too — appreciated by anyone reading them on a phone with a weaker connection, and by the recipient's inbox, which doesn't clog up with gigabytes.

Pro tip

Image Resizer also works while dragging: drag photos into an email window with the right mouse button, and Windows offers extra image options — resizing via Image Resizer among them. Photos then shrink on the way into the attachment, and no extra copies are left behind in the folder.