How to resize images

Resizing pictures with Canva

More Healthwatch are adding Canva to their creative toolkit to enhance their marketing output. The platform is free. All you need is an account. Here's a quick guide to using the platform to edit your images: 

• From the top menu select Create  → Photo editor
• You'll come to a workspace. In the top bar, you want to select Open  → Computer (or wherever the image you want to edit is saved.)
• In the left-hand panel, you, will see multiple photo editing options, including Crop and Resize. Select the option you want and adjust your image accordingly depending on your needs. 
• In the top bar you'll have the option to Save your work in a destination of your choice.  
• You can name your file, and hit Save. This will automatically download your altered image to your chosen save destination - saving to your computer is the easiest option. 

Resizing pictures with BeFunky

BeFunky is a free image editing platform that allows you to crop and resize images. It is free to use and you don't need an account. Here's a quick guide to using the platform to edit your images: 

• From the homepage , select Resize & Magic Switch, and look at the Resize section.
• You can choose from common design sizes, browse by category and choose multiple sizes.
• To use your own measurements, select Custom size. 
• Select Continue, and choose how you want to resize. 

For more help mastering Canva, check out their Design Academy. It's full of useful tutorials. 

Microsoft Office Picture Manager and Microsoft Paint, both of which are free and may already installed on your PC by default.

Resizing pictures with Microsoft Paint

Microsoft Paint is a very basic picture editing program, so it has quite limited functionality. However, it does provide a simple and quick way of resizing images.

• Open Paint – Start → Programmes → Accessories → Paint
• Open the file you want to edit
• Click Resize
• This will bring up the Resize and Skew pop-up.
• Select the pixels option
• Untick maintain aspect ratio and put in the dimensions you need and click ‘Ok’

If doing this has distorted your image, then you will need to click undo and crop your image first. For example, if you have an image that is 246 x 246 pixels and you want it to be 200 x 74 pixels simply resizing it will distort the image.

Resizing pictures for social media

Landscape by Sprout Social is a free online tool that helps you resize, crop and scale images ready for use across multiple social media platforms.

Use this cheat sheet to to see all of the correct dimensions for pictures across the different channels. 

Don't forget

You will need to get consent from people that you take pictures of at events. Use our consent form.

Resizing pictures with Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Picture Manager is slightly more advanced than Microsoft Paint and has a few additional functions for editing pictures.

• Find the picture you want to edit in your documents, right click and then go to Open with and select Microsoft Office.
• To resize images, go to Picture → Resize

Using the ‘Percentage of original width x height’ option in the right-hand menu, use the arrows to decrease the size. The ‘original size’ is the size the image was when you opened it and the ‘new size’ is the size that you’re changing it too. The ‘new size’ will change as you decrease the percentage.

Cropping images

If you need to crop the image go to Picture → Crop

Here you can either drag the corners of the image, or use the arrows in the right hand menu to trim your image down to a more precise size.