Someone finally convinced you to buy a digital camera and you went out and bought a 22,500 MP camera and the pictures are too darn big to do anything with, right? You probably own a PC, which I assume you do since if you used a Mac or Linux, you already know enough about this stuff that you wouldn't need to ask!
It's pretty simple- find the picture in your computer (likely in My Documents -> My Pictures) but don't open it. Right click on the file and select "Open With" then go down to "Paint." There are better programs, but again, if you have them, you probably don't need these instructions! Everyone has Paint!
Once your picture is open, go along the top until you find a heading called "Image." Click on that and you get a few options. Choose "Stretch/Skew" and a new little box pops up. Stick with the Stretch boxes on top as the Skew boxes will just make a mess. The boxes have "100" in them, which is a percentage. Change that to "50" to make the picture half the size it is now, "25" to make it a quarter of the size etc. Make certain both boxes have the same numbers in them or else it will shrink one way and not the other, giving you a neat silly putty effect, but probably not what you are after.
Once you have the picture down to what you think is an acceptable level, go to "File" along the top and go down to "Save As" and save the picture with a new name. I usually add an "a" or an "01" on to the end so I can tell it from the original. Before saving, make sure the second drop box says .jpg or .jpeg as that's the most common file type. When that's done, you can hold your mouse over the file (back in My Documents) to see if the file size has shrunk enough to be useful. If it doesn't tell you, right click and go down to Properties and it will tell you how big it is.
Different forums have different size allotments- Multitool.org has a limit of 127K per post and a maximum of 4 files that can be uploaded. That means that your pictures cannot be more than 127k total not each. If you want to upload three pictures that are 80k each, you have to make three posts, each one with it's own picture.
Uploading pictures will be in the next chapter- stay tuned!
Def
