I’m following up my previous post by a matter of seconds because I feel that this is a PSA that some people might need.

As a blogger, one of the most time-consuming tasks I engage in can be image management. I usually rely on Share-X for screenshots, but some games don’t work so well with that app so I have fallen back on the Windows Game Bar which seems to pick up the slack. In my case, I’m playing on a 4K monitor, which means that my screenshots are saved at 3840×2160, and as PNG (which seems to have become the defacto format for the captors I have used). The result is that these images are pretty damn large; I get yelled at by Discord and Twitter all the time when trying to post them, and although WordPress will take images of this size, it’s overkill, takes up server space, and causes WordPress to give me the stink eye during upload. As a result, I find that I need a way to quickly convert and resize these images en masse.

Surprisingly (or not), this is not a simple task for Windows out of the box. Windows Paint can resize by pixel or percent. Paint 3D can save as a smaller format (like JPG). I have historically relied on Photoshop’s “droplet” batch processing for resizing and conversion, but that’s patently overkill for something which seems like it should be a core offering in Windows in 2020.

In searching for a better solution, I came across the PowerToys for Windows 10. For us elders, PowerToys (or PowerTools from previous incarnations) is a well-known side-load of features that enough folks at Microsoft felt were useful and exciting, but which the decision-makers decided weren’t worth including in the shipping OS. Although the Win10 version is currently in “preview”, it is available from GitHub, and it does include a way to resize and convert images in batches! After downloading and installing PowerToys, we’ll get a context menu that allows us to choose from a sample of pre-defined sizes, or to define our own. It seems that the conversion options are limited to “…to JPG”, which is fine by me since I wanted to use this for converting large images to bloggable format.

There are a few other tools included in the package:

• FancyZones: Set up a saved window layout for your desktop. Useful if — like me — you have a “workspace” of essential windows that you open every day by default.
• File Explorer: Adds preview options for SVG and Markdown files.
• PowerRename: Batch rename files with the power of RegEx!
• Shortcut Guide: Hold down the Windows key for longer than 1 second to pop up a chest-sheet for hotkeys on the desktop.
• Window Walker: Displays a search box allowing you to “find” open windows or running processes.