Image tools

Which one do you need?

A form has rejected your file. Read the error carefully first, because it will say either "must not exceed" or "must be at least", and those want opposite tools. For a maximum, start with the compressor nearest your limit. For a minimum, use increase image size in KB.

Something needs to be printed. Work in centimetres or millimetres, not pixels, and set the DPI. Resize in cm handles the conversion and writes the density tag into the file so the printer agrees with you.

A web page is slow. Resize first, convert second. Bring the longest edge down to what the layout actually displays, then convert to WebP and compare the numbers.

You are about to share a photo. Strip the metadata. Phone photos carry the time, the camera and often the exact coordinates where they were taken.

What runs where

Resizing, cropping, converting and hitting a byte target all go through the canvas, which means the image is decoded and re-encoded. That is unavoidable for those jobs and costs a little quality every time, so always work from your original rather than from a file you already processed.

Three tools deliberately avoid the canvas and edit the file structure instead: metadata removal, DPI retagging and file size padding. Those are lossless in the strict sense, because the compressed image data is copied across without being touched.