Compressing Photos Using Microsoft Picture Manager

by Debbie Kaiser and Grant Petersen
August 2007

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Compressing Photos Using Microsoft Picture Manager (PDF; 263 KB)

Use of digital photography is a great tool for documentation, but if not stored properly, is also a huge user of space on our computers and servers. For most of our needs, a compressed photo will suffice, and will also take up less space. For example, photos are often copied from digital cameras into a special C:\ folder or directly into a Toolkit Customer’s Subfolder. It is important to compress pictures before they get checked in, as compressing the photos helps reduce checkin/checkout time, especially when the folders are being checked out remotely.

There are two ways to open Picture Manager.

A1) Browse to your pictures
A2) You can select one or all of the pictures in that folder, right click, and then click open with “Picture Manager”.

or

B1) Click on Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, and Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
B2) Once Picture Manager is open, locate your photo file by clicking on “Locate Pictures” which is located to the right of the screen.

NOTE: Be advised that for digital photos saved as a jpeg, compression is irreversible.

3) Go to “View” and then “Thumbnails”. This will show all of the pictures you have in that particular folder.

4) Select the photos you want to compress holding down the “Cntrl” key and clicking on the photos you want or you can go to “Edit” “Select All”.

5) Now that you selected the pictures you want to compress, go to the “Picture” tab and select “Compress Pictures.” You will get a “Compress pictures settings” toolbar on the right side of the page.

6) Select the amount of Compression you want and click “OK”. The “Documents” setting is good enough for our needs and will be good enough to print a standard 5x7 photo for the customer folder if necessary.

7) Lastly perform a “File Save” and then you can close Picture Manager. The photos you compress will look nearly the same but be substantially smaller in memory.

NOTE: Other photo or picture file-types such as tiffs, for example, do not always automatically compress. If this is the case, a message will appear after you perform a “File Save” that states: “To use the compression setting that was selected a copy of the original file <filename> will be created in a compressed format.”

8) Select Create File (or Create All if you have multiple photos).

9) When the process is complete, then go back to file and perform a “File Save” again.

10) Select the “Unsaved Edits” button, and delete your original photos.

11) Close Picture Manager.

Last Modified: 08/15/2008