Though higher megapixel camera might help you capture the details to a great extent it’s never easy to share these pictures over the web with family and friends because of its size.

Though there are quite a few applications which help you reduce image size, I should confess I liked Shrink Pic (official site) of them all!

Shrink Pic is a lightweight application which runs in the background (sits on your taskbar) and automatically kicks-in to reduce the size of the images when shared over IM’s, E-mails, etc..

This application works with IM’s like Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc.. I tried it with GTalk but it didn’t seem to work with it.

Shrink Pic also works with Email clients like Outlook express and is compatible with web Browsers (Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome), which means it will work with web based e-mails like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc and other web based applications which deal with pictures and images.

I term this application as one of the best image size reducer because it not only offers impressive compression but it does not require you to do beside your regular workflow.

For example you can just go about attaching a full sized image while composing an e-mail in Gmail, Shrink Pic automatically reduces the size to predefined standards. Similarly it automatically kicksin and reduces the size of the images that are being shared over IM as well.

The following image show the application interface. Just check the box next to “Enable Photo Compression” and the application will kick-in next time you are trying to share a picture.

You can also select compression levels from a pre-defined list or define a custom size using the “custom” option.

If you think the compression will take away from the quality of the image, just drag and drop the image on the application to see a preview.

On the second tab “Photo Types” you can select the image types that should be processed using Shrink Pic. By default it is set to JPG only as cameras saves images in JPG format.

We did play around with the tool a little bit and I noticed excellent performance without compromising the quality of the image. One of the images we compressed shrunk to 71KB for 800×600 resolution from a 3.5MB size.

Isn’t that amazing? I guess it is! Click here to download Shrink Pic if you like the application.