A colleague recently needed to both crop images to a square aspect ratio and resize them down to thumbnail size. At first glance, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the free downloadable image editor for Windows 7 and Vista, seemed to offer no help. But a little peering into the app showed it was completely up to the task.

The Crop tool is obvious, with its big button in the Edit ribbon. And getting a square crop isn't much harder; just click the drop-down arrow below the button, choose Proportion, and then Square at the bottom of the list of choices. This constrains the crop box to a resizable square, and clicking the button again or just hitting the Enter key completes the crop. Other standard proportions, such as 8x10, A4, or widescreen (16x9), or custom dimensions are also on offer.

Now, for resizing. On the single image edit view, there's no right-click or toolbar button choice for resizing. But if you head to the small Properties button, the second choice is Resize. This offers a few presets for the maximum dimension on a side, for example, Smaller—640 pixels, Medium—1024, and Large—1280. What we needed a smaller thumbnail size, so the Custom option let us enter any pixel dimension, say 100 pixels.

Clicking the Resize and Save button didn't seem to have any effect on the on-screen image, so we wondered if it really had worked. Turns out that Photo Gallery saves a separate copy of the image at the new size, adding the new dimensions to the filename in parentheses, e.g., Mexico_281 (100x100).jpg. Your original picture file will still be in the folder, too. Where's the folder? Just right-click the image and choose "Open file location" to see both.

Finally, what if you want to resize a bunch of pictures all at once? No problemo. In gallery view, you can select a bunch of photos (but note that this doesn't just mean clicking on them—you have to actually place the mouse pointer in the thumbnail's check box at the upper-left), and then right-clicking gets you the same Resize dialog we saw before. To get the "Open file location" right-click choice, deselect all but one of the thumbnails.