I usually clip the less important parts of an image using GIMP, if I want to reduce its size.

What is the other way of doing it which does not require clipping ?

Kindly guide !

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. If you mean the size (in bytes) of an image, when you save the image using GIMP you can change options around for the quality of the image and other things to make them take up less room but maybe not be as high-quality as they were to begin with. Otherwise, I can't think of any way to do it besides cropping the image, or something like that.

Perhaps imagemagick may be what you are looking for:

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

I have only used this a couple of times myself,so I'm no expert but I did manage to resize the image I needed.
Should be available via you distribution package manager.

Try Image -> Scale Image

the trooper
Thanks, I shall see how ImageMagic works once I have it installed.


Tex,
Thanks, your pointer was helpful. But I saw your profile picture, it is a big picture but definitely it must be of prerequisite size ! How come your picture is big but still fits in there ?

Well, it has to be square, so I got a larger image, and then cut it out to be square, pasted it as a new image, then scaled it to whatever was needed.

I've only used Gwenview to reduce image size without clipping. There's a Resize option in the Edit menu. Seems to work OK.

I don't understand whether anishakaul wants to reduce the file size or scale down the image.

Anisha;

There are fundamentally only three ways of reducing the size of an image file:

1. Cropping--discarding part of the image. (I think this is what you mean by "clipping")

2. Down-sampling--reducing the number of pixels used to represent the image. (This reduces the SPATIAL resolution)

3. Compression--reducing the fidelity of the encoding--eg with jpg compression. If an image is in RGB format and you change it to something like indexed color, that would also be considered compression. (Compression normally reduces RADIOMETRIC resolution--ie the acccuracy in depicting color and brightness information)

All can be done with just any reasonable image editor (GIMP for sure) or with Imagemagick.

Pixel,

Thanks for replying, I shall get back to this thread in a few days.

-Anisha

If file size is the concern, jpeg can compress quite aggressively. You can go down to quality 25 or so and still have the image quite usable.

I disagree. Depending on the image, jpg compression at a quality of 25 can look absolutely terrible. For example, try it on an image with a solid object (or text) against a white background.

Semantics:
To me, "image size" means the size in pixels. By contrast, "file size" is the combination of image size and the encoding and/or compression method.

It made my picture too small just like yours

I have the rectangle image, cutting it to square doesn't make it look good Even then I squared it off through Gwenview, then you say that I should scale it? Scaling reduces the dimensions and as LQ saya 120 by 120, it is extremely small!

HELP.
There must be some way to preserve the dimensions and reduce the size as well?

So you want to turn a rectangular image into a square image and not clip or stretch it? Impossible, unless you put colored bars on the sides of the image.

See here:
Batch Resize Images Using Imagemagick - Digital Photography Tips and Techniques

Use mogrify. By default, it scales the image without stretching it. If you want to stretch or squeeze it to fit the new size, then you put an exclamation mark after the resolution. Examples are at the link above.