Don;698320 Wrote:

It is possible but...

I'm reluctant to suggest a third party software to batch process all
those pics because at that size I believe they are already compressed
(eg Jpegs). I doubt you will need daily access to all those pics so I
would leave them as it is and burn them onto a DVD (4.5gig capacity) as
data files.

You can still access them by slipping the dvd in the dvd player.

That should take around 15 minutes...

I don't think reducing the size any further will make much difference to how
the OS performs.  Most of my photographs are over 3MB, but once they're sat
on the disk, that's that.

If it's "slow" because its indexing or generating thumbnails for the images
I'd recommend just letting it work for a while until its done.

Else Windows Live Photo Gallery can batch resize. http://get.live.com/

You don't really want to compress those images - either it will mean that
the machine takes extra time to decompress them, or that you lose too much
image quality with the extra compression.  What you really want to do is to
resize them to a lower pixel count.

This product will batch resize your images for you.  It creates a new copy,
so after the procedure is run the originals can be archived to DVD and you
can work with the smaller versions. You have several options for how the new
size gets calculated.  Be careful to select the most appropriate resizing
algorithm so that there is minimal loss of quality - the manual has details
about how each one works and when to use it.  If you use JPG format, you can
also set the JPG compression factor to give the best tradeoff between
quality and size.
http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gwspro.html