Resize an image

Fit, fill, or stretch

The confusing part of resizing isn't the size, it's what happens when the shape you asked for doesn't match the shape of your photo. Ask for a 1080×1080 square from a photo that's wider than it is tall, and something has to give. There are only three honest answers, and this tool shows you which one you're choosing before it runs.

• Fit inside keeps your whole image and makes it as large as it can be within your dimensions. The result may be smaller than the box in one direction — a wide photo fit into a square comes out wide, not square. Nothing is cropped or distorted. This is what you want most of the time.
• Fill & crop covers the box completely and trims the overflow from the edges. You get exactly the dimensions you asked for, at the cost of losing a strip from two sides. Right for thumbnails and profile pictures, where the exact shape matters more than keeping every pixel.
• Stretch forces your image into the exact dimensions by distorting it. Faces go wide or tall and it looks wrong. It exists for the rare case where you genuinely need it, and the diagram makes clear that's what you're asking for.

Keeping the aspect ratio

With the lock closed, typing a width fills in the matching height automatically, so the image can't distort. Open the lock to set both independently — at which point the fit setting above decides what happens to the mismatch. For a straight "make this smaller," leave the lock closed and set one dimension.

Making things larger

You can scale past 100%, but a browser can't invent detail that was never captured. Enlarging a small image makes it bigger and softer, not sharper — there's no genuine way around that, and any tool promising otherwise is guessing at pixels. For modest enlargements it's fine; for turning a thumbnail into a poster it won't be. The "don't enlarge" checkbox caps every image at its original size, which is useful when batch-resizing a mixed pile where some are already small.

How the resizing is done

Shrinking an image well is harder than it sounds. Halving dimensions in one step throws away three of every four pixels and leaves edges jagged. This resizes in repeated halving steps down to the final size, which lets each step average the pixels it's dropping — the same approach good photo software uses, and much cleaner than a single scaling pass. It all happens on your machine; the images are never uploaded.

Resize and compress are different jobs

Resizing changes the pixel dimensions. Compressing changes the file size at fixed dimensions. They're often confused because both make files smaller, but they answer different questions. If your target is "under 200KB" rather than "800 pixels wide," the compress to an exact size tool is the one you want — though resizing first, then compressing, gives you the smallest file of all.