Normally, you would need to fire up a complex image editing application like Photoshop or Gimp just to perform the trivial task of resizing an picture. In that case, many people would find themselves confused by the numerous options and menus. Ingenuity to the rescue: now it is possible to resize images by either using a newbie-friendly program, called iZoom, or with one of several online applications.

iZoom is free, Java-based software, available for all major platforms -- MacOS, Windows, and Linux. It is designed specifically for resizing and cropping images for the most popular uses, and today that means your blog, iPod, or Facebook profile.

From the program's website: "iZoom is very useful for creating web photo galleries, forum-user avatars, and image thumbnails, or resizing your photos for perfect viewing on your iPod photo screen. Drag photos from your filesystem or directly from iPhoto to the iZoom canvas."

Granted, desktop software is not the only way to resize images easily -- online services like Resizr.com and ImageResizeOnline.com come to mind, but iZoom has a pretty interface, is more reliable than a web application, and is likely to become the right tool for many people.