Knowing how to resize your images is an important tool for any dog trainer. You’ll use it to make your images perfectly fit your website, your marketing materials, your social media, etc. And it’s incredibly easy to do once you know how! You can even use free online editing tools to get the job done.

Here, I’ll outline everything you need to know. But first things first: why is it important to resize your images?

Why You Need to Resize Your Images

Making sure we have the right images at the right size is incredibly important when you’re building a website or designing marketing materials. It’s tempting to just make all of your images the same size and call it done — but if you only need an image half that size, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

When working with images on a website we always want our image to be just big enough and no bigger — that’s because images have a serious impact on the amount of time it takes a webpage to load. And if a website doesn’t load quickly, then users go elsewhere.

For other marketing materials — like printed pamphlets, brochures, etc. — being able to get your image to the right size means you’ll be able to lay your design out appropriately. Say your image is too small and no one can see it, or, conversely, it’s too big and it goes over into the next page and looks wonky. Neither of those are ideal scenarios. Knowing how to make an image the appropriate size will ensure your materials look good.

So: take the time to resize your images as you go along, so that you always have the right size image for where you plan to use it.

So how big are your images, really?

You can’t resize your images without first knowing what size they currently are — what if they’re already the size you need and you just don’t know it?

Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, there is a pretty easy way to look at an image file and figure out what it’s dimensions are.

On a PC if you hover over the image, it shows you the “dimensions” in pixels.

You can also right click on the image, and then choose “Properties” and go to the “Details” tab.

On a Macbook, you can see your image size using your finder window. If you choose to show items in columns, and then click on an image, it displays the dimensions under the preview for that image.

How to Resize Your Images

Personally, I use Photoshop to resize images, but since Photoshop is expensive and I have it because I do a lot of other things using it too, we wanted to find some free options for you.

Those options? Photo Pea and Canva.

These graphic design platforms will let you resize your images for free! Here are some step-by-step videos we recorded for you on how to do so.

Resizing your images in Photo Pea

Photo Pea is a great option if you’re in a rush or if you don’t do much work with graphic design or editing images. You can go right to the website, quickly resize your image, and save it. Done! Watch the video below to see how easy it is:

Resizing your images in Canva

As I’ve mentioned before, Canva is an awesome resource for dog trainers — it lets you create high-quality graphics for free. All you need to do is create an account. And it has the added benefit of saving all the images you create, so if you ever need to find an image you edited, it’ll be right there.

Here’s how to resize your image in Canva:

And that’s everything you need to begin resizing your images — Have fun tinkering!