How to Make an Image Smaller: The Ultimate Guide

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Images are rarely the size you need them. Whether you're building a social media campaign or a photo collage, we often need to make large images a little smaller—or a lot smaller! Image resizing is an important part of graphic design. You can grow or shrink images to fit them into the structure of your artwork. You can also reduce the file size to reduce the amount of space it takes in storage and time your work takes to load.

How do you make an image smaller? This is the ultimate guide to reducing both the dimension and resolution size of your digital image.

Why shrink an image?

Why do we shrink images? We do this to resize images into a smaller format and to make them fit into smaller storage.

Smaller images—dimensions

Shrinking the dimensions—height and width—of an image is a common requirement of design. When you make a photo layout, the original image may be too large for the frame you defined. Reduce the size of the image to make it fit. Shrink images to fit them into pre-formatted image sizes, to meet platform requirements for image size, or to fit the image into a larger piece of your own artwork.

Smaller files—compression

Shrinking your file size, on the other hand, reduces the amount of data in your image and makes it "smaller" in storage. This also usually lowers the number and precision of pixels in the image and can reduce the quality of the image, depending on the original detail and content. Lighter files load faster on web pages and often, you will need to meet certain file size limitations to upload your work to online platforms.

How to reduce file size

Now let's talk about how to reduce the dimensions and resolution of your images, whether they’re JPGs or PNGs, or others.

How to make images smaller

How do you reduce the size of an image so it fits into a smaller format? This is done by reducing the pixel resolution. Smaller images have fewer pixels, so you'll need to smart-select which pixels to ignore. When you reduce the resolution of an image, you also reduce its file size.

1. First, pick your image editing software. To reduce the dimensions without losing detail, you will need an advanced image editor like CorelDRAW.
2. Upload your image to your image editor. Some allow a click-and-drag or you can choose your image from the file explorer.
3. Reset the image size. You can do this by using the "Scaling' tool or by adjusting the Image settings.
4. Resize for smaller images, resample or compress for smaller images without losing image quality.
5. Save your image with a name that includes its new size.

Make files smaller

How do you make an image file size smaller while keeping it the same dimensions? You will need to compress the image to pack the data tighter and make it load faster when appropriate.

1. Upload your image to an advanced image editor. More simplistic image editors can't reduce file size as effectively.
2. Set your image compression settings.
3. Experiment with compression and quality. Test your file size as you advance your compression settings.
4. Save your image when the file size is within your requirements or limitations.

Conclusion

Adapting the file size of your image is not as hard as it sounds. You can prepare dozens of images for a project or campaign or craft just one image to your artistic needs. No matter why you need to make an image smaller, CorelDRAW has the tools you need to complete your artistic projects and manage the detailed elements of every image file you need to work with.