Resize an image to an exact size

The decision every resizer makes for you silently

Your photo is 4:3. An Instagram story is 9:16. Those two shapes cannot both be satisfied, and there are only two honest ways out:

Crop to fill. The output is exactly 1080×1920, and the parts of the photo that do not fit the taller frame are trimmed off the sides. This is what you want for anything going into a fixed slot — a story, a thumbnail, a profile picture, a banner — because a platform that receives the wrong shape will crop it anyway, and it will do so without asking you which part mattered.

Keep the whole image. Nothing is trimmed, so the output is the largest version of your photo that fits inside the frame — smaller than the size you asked for in one direction. Choose this when losing an edge is worse than not filling the box: a product shot, a diagram, a screenshot where the corners carry information.

There is no third option here that pads the image with white or blurred bars. Padding bakes a background colour into your file that the destination may well not match, and it is easy to add later and impossible to remove once it is pixels.

Why upscaling never works

If you ask for an output bigger than your source, the tool will do it and tell you the factor — because it is worth knowing you are about to make something worse.

Enlarging cannot add detail that was never captured. A 400px image stretched to 1920px has the same amount of real information spread over twenty-three times the area; the extra pixels are interpolated from their neighbours, which is a precise way of saying "guessed". The result looks soft, and no quality setting fixes it, because nothing was lost in compression — it was never there.

If a platform is asking for something larger than the file you have, the fix is a bigger original: the photo straight off the camera rather than the copy that came back through a messaging app.

About the preset sizes

The presets are a maintained table, dated under the picker, not a guess. Sizes for the major platforms are stable over years rather than months — an Instagram square post has been 1080×1080 for a long time — but platforms do change them without announcing it, so the date tells you how much to trust the number.

A few of them are worth knowing regardless of the tool. 1200×630 is the Open Graph size: it is what Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and most link previews read when they render a card for your page. 1280×720 is a YouTube thumbnail and also just plain 720p, which makes it a safe default for anything embedded.1080×1920 is every full-screen vertical format on every platform.

Which format to save as

JPG for photographs, which is nearly always what a social platform wants. PNG for logos, screenshots and anything with transparency or hard edges — text in a JPG at a small size smears in a way that is very hard to unsee.WebP when the destination is a site you control and you want the file smaller.

The quality slider only applies to JPG and WebP; PNG is lossless, which is why the slider disappears when you select it.

Questions

Does resizing reduce the file size?

Usually a great deal, yes — fewer pixels means less to store. If your goal is a specific file size rather than a specific pixel size, though, thecompress-to-a-target-size toolis the one you want: it searches for the quality setting that lands under a limit, which is a different problem.

Can I resize several images at once?

Not here — this page works on one image at a time so it can show you the result before you commit to it. Batch resizing without a preview is how a hundred photos get cropped the wrong way.

Is the crop always centred?

Yes. The frame is taken from the middle of the image, which is right most of the time and wrong for an off-centre subject. If the crop cuts the wrong thing, crop it yourself first and then resize the result.

What happens to EXIF and location data?

It is dropped. The browser re-encodes from decoded pixels and writes nothing else, so camera settings, capture time and GPS coordinates do not survive. For posting online that is a bonus; for archiving, keep your originals.

My photo came out rotated correctly — was that automatic?

Yes. Photos from phones are often stored sideways with an orientation flag telling the viewer to rotate them. That flag is applied when the image is decoded, so what you see in the preview is what you get.