Image Resizer

Four requirements, worked out

"Maximum 800 by 600 pixels"

This is a box, not a size. Choose fitting inside a box, put 800 and 600 in, and a landscape photograph comes out 800 by 600 while a portrait one comes out 450 by 600. Both are inside the limit, and neither has been cut or squashed. Using width alone would give a portrait photograph a height of over a thousand, which the form would reject.

"Upload a photo, 200 by 230 pixels"

An exact size, which is the Indian exam portal standard. Fit inside a box of 200 by 230, then check the result: if your photograph is not already close to that shape, one side will come up short, and the honest fix is to crop it to roughly 200 by 230 in your phone's photo app first, then resize here.

"Images should be no more than 1MB"

A file size, so the direct answer is the compressor. But resizing first helps enormously: a 12 megapixel photograph reduced to 1600 pixels wide is usually already under a megabyte before any compression at all, and it looks better than the same file squeezed to 1 MB at full dimensions.

"Make these forty product photos the same size"

Drop the lot in with a width set. Every one comes out at that width, each keeping its own proportions, named with its own filename and the new dimensions. Take the whole set as a zip.

The pattern behind all four is the same question: is the requirement in pixels or in bytes? Pixels means resize, bytes means compress, and a requirement that mentions both means resize first and compress second.

The four ways to say what you want

• By width. Give a width and the height follows, so the picture keeps its shape. This is the one to use for images going on a web page.
• By height. The same in the other direction, for when a row of images has to line up.
• By percentage. Halve everything, or take a quarter, without working out what that is in pixels. Over 100 enlarges, which is possible but rarely a good idea.
• Fit inside a box. Give both numbers and the picture is scaled until one side touches, with the other having room to spare. Nothing is cropped and nothing is stretched, which is what a maximum size usually means.

Fitting inside a box is the one people misread. A 4000 by 3000 photograph fitted into 1000 by 1000 comes out 1000 by 750, not 1000 by 1000, because making it square would mean either squashing it or cutting a third of it off. If you genuinely want the exact box and do not mind the distortion, there is a switch for it.

Enlarging, and why it disappoints

A 400 pixel image asked to become 1600 does not gain detail. The browser invents the pixels in between by averaging their neighbours, which is why the result looks soft rather than sharp. Nothing can recover information that was never recorded. If you need a larger image, go back to the original file if there is one.

Resize, compress, or crop

Resize, which is this page

Changes how many pixels there are. Use it when the requirement is in pixels, or when the picture is simply far larger than the place it is going.

Compress, which is the next page along

Keeps every pixel and stores them with less data. Use it when the requirement is in kilobytes: 20 KB, 50 KB, 200 KB. It hits an exact number, which resizing cannot.

Crop

Cuts part of the picture away, changing what is in it rather than how big it is. That is a different job and not one this page does: nothing here removes any part of your image.

Both together

Common, and the right order is resize first, compress second. A smaller picture needs less compression to reach the same file size, so it comes out looking better than the same target reached by compression alone.

If something does not look right

The result is not the size I asked for

If you chose to fit inside a box, that is the point: the picture is scaled until one side touches and the other has room, so the shape is kept. Turn off "keep the picture's shape" to get the exact box, and accept the stretching that comes with it.

The image looks soft

Either it was enlarged, in which case nothing can be done because the detail was never there, or it was reduced very far in one step. Going from 6000 pixels to 200 loses a great deal by definition.

My transparent background went white

You saved as JPG, which cannot store transparency. Choose PNG or WebP to keep it.

The file got bigger

Possible if you changed format: a photograph saved as PNG is often larger than the same photograph as JPG, however few pixels it has, because PNG stores every one exactly. Keep the original format, or choose JPG.

My iPhone photos will not open

iPhones save as HEIC and only Safari can decode it. On an iPhone or a Mac this page reads them normally; in Chrome on a desktop it cannot. Convert them first with our HEIC to JPG page in Safari.

Nothing happens when I drop a file

Fill in the size first. With an empty width there is nothing to resize to, and the row says so rather than guessing.

Free, with no account and no watermark

No sign-up, no daily limit, no watermark and no cap on how many files or how large they are. The work happens on your computer, so there is nothing for us to charge for.

Each file keeps your own name with the new size added, so holiday.jpg becomes holiday-800x600.jpg, which means a folder of resized images is still sorted and still recognisable. Take them one at a time or the whole set as a zip.

If what you actually needed was a file under a certain number of kilobytes, our image compressor takes an exact target and finds the quality that meets it. And if the format is the problem rather than the size, the image converters handle that.