Resize images to any dimension

Fit, fill, pad or stretch

Take a portrait photo from your phone and try to make it a 1280 × 720 YouTube thumbnail. The shapes don't match, so something has to give. The resize mode is where you decide what.

Fit inside shrinks the photo until all of it fits. Nothing gets cut, but you won't get 1280 × 720. A typical phone photo comes out at 540 × 720, because the height runs out long before the width does.

Fill and crop does give you 1280 × 720, and pays for it by slicing off the top and bottom of the photo. That works for a landscape or a product shot. On a group photo, it usually costs someone their head.

Pad to exact size also lands on 1280 × 720, but keeps the whole photo and fills the empty strips on either side. You can use white, black, transparency, the photo's average colour, or a blurred copy of the photo itself. The blurred one is the look you see on a lot of Instagram stories.

Stretch just pulls the photo out to 1280 × 720. Here that makes everything in it roughly two and a half times wider than it should be. It is rarely what anyone wants.

Can't decide? Go with fit inside. If the frame needs tightening later, Crop Image will do it. That only works in one direction, though: once a crop has cut something off, there's no getting it back.

Six ways to set the size

Which one you want depends on how the size was given to you. Start from that, not from the list.

• Someone said "1920 × 1080"? That is Exact size. Leave the ratio locked and you only need the width; the height follows on its own.
• It's for Instagram, YouTube, a WhatsApp profile or a passport? Popular size has 26 of these already filled in, so there is nothing to look up.
• You just want everything smaller, say by half? Use Percentage and type 50. Every image in the batch shrinks by the same amount.
• A mix of portrait and landscape shots for a website? Set Longest side to 1600. The landscape ones come out 1600 wide, the portrait ones 1600 tall, and none of them ends up oversized.
• A printer or a form asked for centimetres or inches? Print size turns that into pixels at whatever DPI you pick.
• The only rule is "under 200 KB"? That is File size (KB), and it gets its own section below.

How to resize an image to a size in KB

Upload forms love a KB limit, and it is where most people get stuck. Here it is one setting: put Resize by on File size (KB), type the limit, and resize.

Behind that, a photo already under your limit is left at its own size. One that isn't gets scaled down a step at a time until the file fits, so you keep as many pixels as the limit allows. No guessing at widths, no uploading, getting rejected and starting again.

Why not just compress harder? A phone photo has far more pixels than a 200 KB file can hold well. Squeeze all 4000 of them into 200 KB and the detail turns blocky and smeared. Bring the photo down to around 1200 pixels wide first and the same 200 KB looks clean.

One exception: if the size in pixels is already right and only the file is too heavy, you don't want this tool. Compress Image makes the file smaller and leaves the pixels alone.

Passport and ID photo sizes

Open Popular size and you'll find two passport presets. 35 × 45 mm is the one most countries use. It comes out at 413 × 531 pixels, which is exactly that size printed at 300 DPI. 2 × 2 in is for US passports, at 600 × 600 pixels.

Rules do differ from country to country, and a few ask for something else, so check yours before you submit.

Online forms often add a KB cap on top. If yours turns the photo away for being too big, put it through Compress Image. That brings the file size down without touching the pixel size the form asked for.

Resizing without wrecking the quality

Making an image smaller is safe. Pixels get averaged together, and Sharpen after resizing restores crisp edges afterwards.

Making one bigger is different. The detail was never captured, so the software can only estimate the new pixels. Enlarged photos look soft, and no tool can honestly fix that.

Resizing a folder? Leave Do not enlarge images that are already smaller ticked. Small files are then left at their own size instead of being blown up and blurred.

Resampling controls how the pixels are worked out. Lanczos is the sharpest and right for photos. Nearest is for pixel art, game sprites and small icons, where you want hard squares rather than a blur.

Resizing, cropping and compressing are three different jobs

People say "make it smaller" and mean three different things, so it helps to be exact. Take a 3000 × 2000 holiday photo.

Resizing it to 900 × 600 keeps the whole scene: beach, sky, everyone in it, just described with fewer pixels.

Cropping keeps a piece (the two people in the middle, say) and throws the rest away. The piece you keep isn't touched, so it's exactly as sharp as before.

Compressing doesn't change the picture as such. It is still 3000 × 2000. The file is stored more efficiently, maybe 600 KB where it was 4 MB, and if you zoom right in, fine edges can go slightly soft. That is Compress Image's job rather than this one's.

Keeping the proportions

Lock aspect ratio is on by default. Give a 4000 × 3000 photo a width of 1200 and the height becomes 900 without you typing it.

Sometimes you really do need a different shape, for instance a 1200 × 630 link preview made from a square photo. Turn the lock off for that and use fill and crop. Stretch would also reach 1200 × 630, but by widening everything in the picture.

Print size and DPI

Print sizes are worked out the way a print shop does it, size times resolution. Ask for 10 × 15 cm at 300 DPI and you get 1181 × 1772 pixels. The result screen then confirms it: "Print resolution set to 300 DPI — prints at 10.0 × 15.0 cm."

Only JPG and PNG files have a place to store the DPI. WebP and AVIF don't, and the tool says so instead of quietly dropping it. If the pixels are fine and just the DPI is off (a form wants 300, your file says 72), change Print resolution (DPI) by itself and leave everything else.

See every image before you resize

The preview shows up as soon as you add files: each image at its new size, with an estimated file size beside it. It is an estimate, but it warns you early when something is going to come out far too big.

With fill and crop, every image gets a frame you can drag to where you want it. Frames you don't touch use smart cropping, which looks for the subject. When it picks the wrong thing, Crop focus pins every crop to the centre, top, bottom, left or right.

Transparency, animations and location data

The result screen tells you when it had to change something. These are the messages you're most likely to see:

• "JPG has no transparency, so transparent areas were filled with white." Choose PNG, WebP or AVIF to keep a see-through background.
• "Animation kept (24 frames)." GIFs and animated WebPs stay animated. Pick an output that can't animate, such as JPG, and it comes back as a GIF instead.
• "HEIC was saved as JPG, which every device and website can open." TIFF and BMP get the same treatment when the output is left on Keep original.

Strip EXIF and location data is on from the start. It removes the GPS position your phone saved with the photo, along with the camera details. Turn it off only if you need that information kept, say for a photo archive.

Common sizes

The sizes people look up most often. Everything except the website width is a preset, so you can choose it by name under Popular size.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column.

There are 26 presets in all, including X, Pinterest, WhatsApp, a YouTube channel banner, 4K and an A4 page at 300 DPI.

Yes. Your files are deleted from our servers one hour after processing, automatically.

Nothing is stored past that hour. Nothing is read by a person. Nothing is used to train anything. Every upload and download runs over HTTPS.

If you would rather nothing was uploaded at all, open Resize on this device. Your browser does the work and the photos never reach our servers. It takes exact pixel sizes and the four resize modes; for presets, KB limits, print sizes, HEIC or TIFF, use the main resizer.

EXIF and location data is stripped by default, so a photo you post does not carry the address where it was taken.