About The Image Prep
Image tools built for people who publish: sellers listing products, creators making thumbnails, and anyone who has been told their file is the wrong size.
The problem this solves
Publishing anything online means meeting somebody's image specification. Etsy wants 2000 pixels on the shortest side. Amazon wants a pure white background and 1600 pixels. YouTube caps mobile thumbnail uploads at 2 MB. A printer wants 300 DPI. Each of these is a small, annoying, entirely solvable problem, and the existing free tools for solving them are mostly unpleasant: they upload your files to a server you know nothing about, wrap the result in advertising, demand an account for a thirty-second task, or quietly do the job badly.
How these tools work
Everything here runs inside your browser. Modern browsers can decode, transform and re-encode images entirely on your own machine, using the same compression libraries that desktop software uses, compiled to WebAssembly. There is no upload step because there is no server doing the work.
That has three consequences worth spelling out. Your files stay private, because they never travel. There is no queue, because you are not sharing a server with anyone. And there is no file size limit imposed by an upload form — the only limit is your own device's memory.
What is done differently here
You can aim at a file size, not just a quality slider
Most free compressors give you a quality slider and leave you to guess. But real requirements are stated in megabytes, not quality units. The compressors here let you name the size you need and search for the highest quality that fits underneath it. See the JPG compressor for the clearest example.
Metadata editing does not re-compress your image
Removing EXIF data or changing DPI does not require touching a single pixel — it only requires rewriting a small block of the file. Most tools decode and re-save the whole image anyway, which throws away quality for no reason. The EXIF remover and the DPI tool operate on the file structure directly, so the image that comes out is pixel-for-pixel identical to the one that went in.
DPI changes that actually stick
A JPEG can record its resolution in two different places, and most online tools write only one of them. Photoshop and Word read the other one, see the old value, and appear to ignore the change entirely. This is the single most common complaint about DPI tools, and it is a bug rather than a mystery. Ours writes both.
Photos do not come out sideways
Phone cameras record orientation as a tag rather than rotating the stored pixels. Tools that ignore the tag output rotated images. Every tool here reads it and applies the rotation properly.
Limits are stated, not hidden
Every tool page has a section describing what it cannot do. Lossless PNG compression saves 10 to 30 percent, not the 70 percent some sites advertise while quietly performing colour reduction. Enlarging an image cannot invent detail. A watermark is a deterrent, not protection. Knowing the boundary before you start saves more time than an optimistic claim.
What is here
14 tools at the moment, covering compression, format conversion, resizing and cropping, metadata, and generating icon and social image sets. Alongside them are guides covering the specifications each platform actually asks for.
Costs and advertising
Because the processing happens on your device, running this site costs almost nothing, which is why the tools can stay free with no account and no upsell. Advertising may appear to cover hosting. Where it does, it is kept away from the buttons you are trying to click.
Corrections
Platform specifications go out of date, and a tool can be wrong. If something here is inaccurate, say so — corrections are welcome and get made.