Resize & Crop
Resize an Image
Resize to an exact pixel size, a percentage, or a ready-made preset for the platform you are uploading to. Uses high quality Lanczos scaling, so downsized images stay sharp.
Size
Fit, fill and stretch
This is the decision that determines whether a resize looks right, and it only matters when the shape you are asking for differs from the shape you have. Ask for a 1080 by 1080 square from a 4:3 photograph and something has to give.
| Mode | What happens | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Fill | Scales until the box is covered, then trims the overflow from the centre | Social posts and thumbnails, where filling the frame matters more than the edges |
| Fit | Scales until the whole image is inside the box, leaving empty space | Product photos and artwork, where nothing may be cut off |
| Stretch | Forces the exact dimensions, distorting the picture | Almost never — but occasionally a spec genuinely demands it |
Fill is right most of the time. Its one hazard is automatic centring: the tool has no idea where the subject of your photo is, so a face near the edge can end up cropped. When framing matters, use the crop tool instead and choose the framing yourself.
Why resized images sometimes look soft
Two different causes, with two different answers.
Enlarging. If you scale a 400 pixel image up to 1200 pixels, the extra pixels have to be invented by interpolating between the ones that exist. No algorithm can recover detail that was never captured, so the result is inherently soft. The only real fix is to start from a larger original.
Poor downscaling. Shrinking an image badly is a solved problem that many tools still get wrong. Naive methods sample scattered pixels and throw the rest away, which produces aliasing — jagged diagonals and shimmering fine detail. This tool uses Lanczos3 resampling, which considers a neighbourhood of surrounding pixels and weights them, preserving sharpness through large reductions.
Resize before you compress, not after
The order matters more than people expect. File size scales roughly with the number of pixels, so halving both width and height leaves a quarter of the pixels and usually something close to a quarter of the file.
That makes resizing a far more powerful size-reduction tool than compression. If you are struggling to fit a photograph under a limit by lowering quality, you are using the weak lever. Reduce the dimensions to what the image will actually be displayed at, and then compress — a 4000 pixel wide photograph shown in a 800 pixel wide column is carrying five times more data than anyone will ever see.
Once the dimensions are right, hand it to the JPG compressor or WebP compressor.
Platform presets
The preset menu covers Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Etsy, Amazon, eBay and Shopify. If you need several sizes from one image at once — a square for the feed, a portrait for the post, a vertical for stories — the social media sizer generates them all together and hands you a ZIP.
How to resize an Image
- Drop one or more images onto the box above.
- Enter the width and height you need, or pick a platform preset such as 1080 x 1350 for an Instagram portrait post.
- Choose how to handle a mismatched aspect ratio: fit inside, fill and crop, or stretch.
- Download the resized images.
Limits worth knowing
Every tool has boundaries. These are this one's, stated plainly so you do not waste time discovering them yourself.
- Enlarging an image cannot invent detail that was never captured. Going much beyond 200% will look soft no matter which algorithm is used.
- Stretch mode distorts the picture. It is included because occasionally you genuinely need it, but fit or fill is almost always the right choice.
- Resizing re-encodes the file, so a JPG loses a small amount of quality in the process. Resize once from the original rather than repeatedly.