How do I resize photographs for my Motorola RAZR?

That's surprising to hear because I find that there's a high degree of interoperability between my Mac and my Moto RAZR V3c cellphone, actually (though, to be fair, that's because I still have OBEX enabled on my Verizon phone, as I discuss here: Motorola RAZR V3 + Verizon != OBEX?)

First off, I grabbed an image off my RAZR to see what size it was. My camera phone is configured to 1280x1024, FINE resolution, so each of my images is fairly large already, but I copied the image across and opened it up in GraphicConverter, as I'll discuss in just a sec:

As you can see, it's a pretty large image though the file size is pleasantly slim at 132Kbytes. That's pretty small, I admit, and the phone itself doesn't have much memory to store images, so if you have a bunch of photos or hundreds of SMS messages saved on the device, you might just be running out of space!

You can also use GraphicConverter to resize and compress your images, though, and since GC is included on modern Mac systems, let's have a look at how you can resize a larger image to hopefully fit your RAZR. (Quick editorial comment, too: GraphicConverter is shareware and if you are using it, I highly encourage you to pay the shareware fee and help keep a roof over programmer Thorsten Lemke's head).

I'm going to go ahead and open up a fairly large image that is from a recent trip my family took to Hawaii:

That image is at 17% of its original size (see the lower left corner): the full image is a healthy 2.6MB in size, far more than we want to copy onto the RAZR! The first step is to shrink it down, and we can actually shrink it down further than the 1280x1024. This can be done by choosing Picture --> Scale:

Now there are lots of options:

Since I've already used the view scaling to find out that 17% is a reasonable size for this otherwise enormous image, I'll use that for the scaling value too, and enter 17 into the very first box. The program automatically keeps the proportions of the image, so the next step is to click "Next".

The image is quickly and efficiently resized, and now all I have to do is use File --> Save As... and now GraphicConverter helps me out by showing the resultant file size for the image at different JPEG resolutions:

Now I get to access the resolutions and see the resultant sizes I'll get. I try to keep the resolution as high as possible (you can see here it's 95%):

The resultant file? 34Kbytes. Small, clean, attractive, and easily stored on my RAZR.

I hope that helps you master your own interoperability between your Apple Mac and your Motorola RAZR phone!