I am trying to resize a large image (about 20 inches) down to a thumbnail size (approximately 2.5 inches). It does not appear to resize automatically. I tried the cropping tool, but it does not do it. Is there another tool I need to use?
Yes, there are many tools you can use to crop images. The simplest is to use the “crop” tool in the “select” menu. In the top left corner of the image, click on the arrow to open the selection box. Drag across the part of the image you wish to include in the crop. The image will then be cropped so that the part you selected remains the same size. For example, if you wanted to crop the top half of the image, hold down the shift key while dragging the box. If you want to crop to a square, hold down the alt key while dragging.
If you want to crop the image using the full width and height of the canvas, click on the “adjust” tool in the toolbox at the bottom of the screen. In the “image” window, drag across the top of the image and hold down the shift key to select the area you want. Then click and drag across the bottom of the image to select the other side. This is a much more accurate method, but you need to be very careful. As you drag, you need to ensure that you are dragging the bottom of the canvas, rather than the image itself.
If you have a lot of images to resize, you may find that Lightroom has a “batch process” option. This allows you to run the resizing on multiple images. Simply click on the arrow at the bottom of the “preview” screen and choose “batch process.” In the “image” window, click on the green plus icon and choose the files you wish to resize.