A colleague recently needed to both crop images to a square aspect ratio and resize them down to thumbnail size. At first glance, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the free downloadable image editor for Windows 7 and Vista, seemed to offer no help. But a little peering into the app showed it was completely up to the task.

The Crop tool is obvious, with its big button in the Edit ribbon. And getting a square crop isn’t much harder; just click the drop-down arrow below the button, choose Proportion, and then Square at the bottom of the list of choices. This constrains the crop box to a resizable square, and clicking the button again or just hitting the Enter key completes the crop. Other standard proportions, such as 8×10, A4, or widescreen (16×9), or custom dimensions are also on offer.

Now, for resizing. On the single image edit view, there’s no right-click or toolbar button choice for resizing. But if you head to the small Properties button, the second choice is Resize. This offers a few presets for the maximum dimension on a side, for example, Smaller—640 pixels, Medium—1024, and Large—1280. What we needed a smaller thumbnail size, so the Custom option let us enter any pixel dimension, say 100 pixels.

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Windows Live Photo Gallery Properties Resize

Clicking the Resize and Save button didn’t seem to have any effect on the on-screen image, so we wondered if it really had worked. Turns out that Photo Gallery saves a separate copy of the image at the new size, adding the new dimensions to the filename in parentheses, e.g., Mexico_281 (100×100).jpg. Your original picture file will still be in the folder, too. Where’s the folder? Just right-click the image and choose “Open file location” to see both.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Open File LocationFinally, what if you want to resize a bunch of pictures all at once? No problemo. In gallery view, you can select a bunch of photos (but note that this doesn’t just mean clicking on them—you have to actually place the mouse pointer in the thumbnail’s check box at the upper-left), and then right-clicking gets you the same Resize dialog we saw before. To get the “Open file location” right-click choice, deselect all but one of the thumbnails.