So I want to give kudos to Tom who was so helpful in the Genesis Forum when I asked him what he used to manage his images. He recommended Faststone Image Viewer.
I downloaded it and right away was able to do the things I needed to do with my image. It is free for home users but commercial users need a license. At this point, I am not a commercial site, but when I become one, I will acquire a license.
I really didn’t have a good tool for sizing my images. The image I was trying to use was already on my site, and I just intended to grab it and size it. It was sized to a small size, I thought, but actually I had done that on the fly in WordPress originally, so the original image was still huge (nearly 2 MB).
Sometimes resizing will be done for you by your theme if you upload a wrongly sized image, but the image is still huge in terms of file size. I wanted to reduce the file size, too. File size takes up space on your website, and it causes your website to have to load a huge file when you really don’t need to.
There are two issues here when I was working with my images: file size and proportion. The themes frequently have a spot for an image (say a logo image). You can shrink your image down a bit, but most likely your image isn’t going to match the proportion requirements. For example, the original image I wanted to use for my Welcome Image at the top of my blog, was 4000 x 3000 pixels. The space provided for the image was 1200 x 400. So using Faststone, I reduced the width of my image to 1200 px (and by saving it, I also reduced the size of the file from 4MB to 1 MB).
Now the image was 1200 x 900 px.
If I reduced the 900 px height to 400 px, my image width would be 533 px, which was not wide enough for the space. So I took the image that was 1200 px wide and used Faststone to crop it to the required height.
I had never used Faststone before, but I found the interface intuitive. Edit/Resize-Resample, let me re-proportion my picture and save it under another name (so I didn’t overwrite the original). Then Edit/Crop Board let me set the crop height to 400 and I could move a selector that was set to the size of 1200 x 400 pixels around my picture. Once I found the area in my image I wanted to retain, I cropped the picture and saved it.
Then I had another problem FastStone solved in a just a few minutes. When my Welcome Picture is viewed on a large screen, a cell tower in the distance becomes annoyingly noticeable. So I used Edit/Clone and Heal to remove it. I was able to do everything I needed to do from the Edit Menu. And it has 10 other menus with more features I haven’t even used yet! When I get to those, I will tell you how they worked.
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