Image files like jpeg or png store discrete pixels only. How long 10 pixels are is purely a matter of convention or use. If you diplay the pixels on an old 70 dpi monitor, 10 pixels are 1/7 inch. If you print the pixels on a high resolution 1200 dpi printer, the 10 pixels are a mere 1/120 inch long.
So before you can talk about resizing in terms of real world lengths like foot or meter, you need to fix (fake) a resolution.
Then there are still two ways to resize. Just pretend them to have a different resolution. Or have a program like ImageMagick compute a different number of pixels pretending they keep the resolution. In the end resizing always means to change the number of pixels, whether you do it explicitly or your display or print program does it under the hood to fit the original number of pixels into a given frame size.
imagemagick
to convert images inmm
(milimeter) unit and the answer pointed to do conversion frommm
topixel
according to DPI requirement. This might be applicable for other units as well. – Nov 15 '15 at 09:23