Send photos quickly on Android by re-sizing them before sharing

Shrink Images on Android

Ever found yourself in a situation where you’ve to quickly send a photo to someone but you couldn’t because the photo size is too big and it’s taking time to upload. And you’re impatiently checking if your phone’s internet is working or not or doubt that the internet speed is slow.

Well, it happens. And thankfully, there’s a really simple and neat solution to this common problem among us people who use phone’s with big-megapixel camera’s, and that’s — resize and make the photo you want to share smaller so that it could upload quickly even on a slow internet connection.

This is most helpful when you’re sending a photo using e-mail. Most social networking apps automatically resizes your pictures before uploading to their network. Take Whatsapp for example, you must have noticed when you share a picture using Whatsapp it instantly uploads and gets delivered. That’s because Whatsapp heavily shrinks the image size before starting the upload. But e-mail apps like Gmail doesn’t shrink photo size — hence, the slow upload.

Now re-sizing pictures has its own issues as well. In the process of making pictures smaller you’d probably also hurt its quality and detail. Not much that it’d make you upset. Even your favorite social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. show you re-sized pictures of your friends and ‘pretty-faced celebrities’ you follow so that your phone/pc could load them faster. So re-sizing is not like you’d ruin the picture. If your purpose is just sharing the picture for someone’s viewing purpose than re-sizing it is a good option to share quickly and save on your internet connection data. However if you’re sharing the picture for editing or printing purposes than you must not resize them. Because for printing and editing purposes pictures must contain every possible detail on them.

So how can you re-size the pictures?

Well, there are plenty of apps in the play store for this very purpose. I’ve tried a few of them and they all work nice and pretty. Below are the two I liked the most:

1) AVG Image Shrink & Share

AVG Image Shrink & Share does the shrinking job effectively and aims to make the process easy for you. The best feature I like about it is that you can pre-define shrink size for all the apps on your phone that could share images. For e.g. you can set the preferred size for images shared through Gmail to 800×600 and you’ll never have to go through the lengthy process of resizing the image first and then share it with Gmail.

And just to make it clear, this pre-defined profiles doesn’t disturb your regular sharing options through your apps. These pre-defined profiles work under the AVG Image Shrinker sharing option, check out the screenshots below to understand this better:

AVG Image Shrink and Share

Other useful features of this app:

The AVG Image Shrink and Share is not just about that one feature above, check out the full feature list below:

  • Image browser with sorting options
  • Batch Resize + Sharing option
  • Custom Image resize with locked aspect ratio
  • Different section for resized images
  • Pre-defined resize settings for each app
  • Beautiful UI

You must give this app a try.

 icon-download Download AVG Image Shrink & Share

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2) Photo Resize

This is a no-nonsense app. It does not appears in your app drawer and only shows up in the sharing options of an image. Works real quick.

Photo Resize

That’s all this app does. There is no options screen. The image resolutions for Large, Medium, Small and Very small options are pre-defined by the developer and are not shown to the users. It only focuses on the file sizes.

Neat app. Must give it a whirl.

  Download Photo Resize

If you know an app better than the two we mentioned above, do give us a shout in the comments below.

Posted by
Shivam

Shivam is our resident designer and web developer who also enjoys writing. He loves to meditate, drive on the freeways and hunt for snipers during his Call Of Duty playtime. Email: [email protected]

23 Comments

  1. ‘Reduce Photo Size’ is a very good app as well.

  2. ‘Reduce Photo Size’ is a very good app as well.

  3. ‘Reduce Photo Size’ is a very good app as well.

  4. For resize multiple photo, I use Pic Resizer Lite, very easy to use.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.pham.picresizerlite

    1. Thank you Mat. When I need low quality pics, I usually have several. If I only had one I wouldn’t need to downsize it! One at a time is brutal.

  5. For resize multiple photo, I use Pic Resizer Lite, very easy to use.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.pham.picresizerlite

    1. Thank you Mat. When I need low quality pics, I usually have several. If I only had one I wouldn’t need to downsize it! One at a time is brutal.

  6. For resize multiple photo, I use Pic Resizer Lite, very easy to use.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.pham.picresizerlite

  7. Thanks for this info…. AVG is excellent!

  8. Thanks for this info…. AVG is excellent!

  9. Thanks for this info…. AVG is excellent!

  10. I need to resample photos in preparation for printing but I do not need to share them immediately. For instance, an image that is currently 8.5 x11 that I need to be sized to 8×10 without cropping or reducing the image resolution. I am using an android tablet. Can you recommend anything? I tried PSTouch but can’t access the photos without uploading them to Adobe’s cloud.

    1. Try Pixlr app. It’s good.

    2. I have to be missing something somewhere, I downloaded Pixlr Express (which is the only app I could find named Pixlr) and I could not find a way to resample or resize the pictures. There are tons of apps that offer resizing in the description it if I can find a path to resize once I open a picture, the parameters are given as xxx pixels X xxx pixels, I need to see it in xxxx inches X xxx inches. The only apps I’ve found that state resizing parameters in inches are apps that are designed to send the picture to an publisher for printing.

      Please help, this is the reason I wanted a tablet, so In could be more mobile but still work.

  11. I need to resample photos in preparation for printing but I do not need to share them immediately. For instance, an image that is currently 8.5 x11 that I need to be sized to 8×10 without cropping or reducing the image resolution. I am using an android tablet. Can you recommend anything? I tried PSTouch but can’t access the photos without uploading them to Adobe’s cloud.

    1. Try Pixlr app. It’s good.

    2. I have to be missing something somewhere, I downloaded Pixlr Express (which is the only app I could find named Pixlr) and I could not find a way to resample or resize the pictures. There are tons of apps that offer resizing in the description it if I can find a path to resize once I open a picture, the parameters are given as xxx pixels X xxx pixels, I need to see it in xxxx inches X xxx inches. The only apps I’ve found that state resizing parameters in inches are apps that are designed to send the picture to an publisher for printing.

      Please help, this is the reason I wanted a tablet, so In could be more mobile but still work.

  12. I need to resample photos in preparation for printing but I do not need to share them immediately. For instance, an image that is currently 8.5 x11 that I need to be sized to 8×10 without cropping or reducing the image resolution. I am using an android tablet. Can you recommend anything? I tried PSTouch but can’t access the photos without uploading them to Adobe’s cloud.

    1. Try Pixlr app. It’s good.

    2. I have to be missing something somewhere, I downloaded Pixlr Express (which is the only app I could find named Pixlr) and I could not find a way to resample or resize the pictures. There are tons of apps that offer resizing in the description it if I can find a path to resize once I open a picture, the parameters are given as xxx pixels X xxx pixels, I need to see it in xxxx inches X xxx inches. The only apps I’ve found that state resizing parameters in inches are apps that are designed to send the picture to an publisher for printing.

      Please help, this is the reason I wanted a tablet, so In could be more mobile but still work.

  13. I use Photo Resizer HD when need to resize multiple photos.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mp4android.photoresizerhd

  14. I use Photo Resizer HD when need to resize multiple photos.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mp4android.photoresizerhd

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