Image Tools

About Image Tools

Image work splits neatly into two kinds. There is the kind that needs judgement — retouching, colour grading, composition — and the kind that is purely mechanical: this file is 4MB and needs to be under 500KB, this photo is 4000px wide and the upload form caps at 1200, this PNG needs to be a WebP. The second kind shouldn't require opening Photoshop, and it certainly shouldn't require handing your photos to a website.

These tools handle the mechanical kind. They use the Canvas API that is already built into your browser — the same rendering engine that draws every image you see on the web — to decode, transform and re-encode files locally. Because the work is local, results appear as fast as your device can do the maths, which for a typical photo is a fraction of a second.

One thing worth knowing about format choice, since it comes up constantly: JPG is lossy and best for photographs, PNG is lossless and best for graphics with flat colour or transparency, WebP does both jobs at roughly 25–35% smaller file sizes and is supported everywhere that matters in 2026, and AVIF compresses harder still but encodes more slowly. If you are optimising a website and don't want to think about it, WebP is almost always the right default.

Image Tools — Frequently Asked Questions

Do you add a watermark to processed images?

No. Nothing is added to your image at any point. The output contains only your own pixels — the tools have no branding layer, and there is no paid tier that removes one, because there is nothing to remove.

Why did my compressed image lose quality?

Because that is what lossy compression does. JPG, WebP and AVIF shrink files by discarding image data your eye is least likely to notice, and pushing the quality slider lower discards more. If you need a smaller file with no quality change at all, the honest answer is that it usually isn't possible for photographs — though resizing the dimensions down, rather than compressing harder, often gets you there with less visible damage.

Is EXIF metadata preserved?

Generally no. Canvas re-encoding produces a clean image without the original EXIF block, so camera model, timestamps and GPS coordinates are dropped. For most people this is a privacy benefit rather than a loss — but if you rely on EXIF for cataloguing, keep your originals.

Which format should I use for a website?

WebP for almost everything: it handles both photographs and transparency, browser support is effectively universal now, and it typically saves a quarter to a third of the bytes versus an equivalent JPG or PNG. Keep a JPG or PNG fallback only if you must support genuinely ancient browsers.