Why resize an iPhone photo?
An iPhone photo is usually 12 MP, roughly 4000 pixels wide, and some newer models shoot 48 MP. That’s wonderful for prints and cropping, and wildly more than most screens can show. A website column might be 800 px wide. An email preview, smaller still. Sending the full photo wastes everybody’s bandwidth and often trips upload limits.
Resize beats compression for the web
When a file is too big, the instinct is to compress harder. For anything shown on a screen, that’s usually the wrong move.
- A 4032 px photo squeezed hard enough to hit 400 KB has visible blocks and smudged edges.
- The same photo resized to 1920 px fits in 400 KB at a high quality and looks crisp.
Fewer pixels at good quality beats many pixels at bad quality, because the screen was going to throw those extra pixels away anyway. So resize to the display size first, then compress only if you still need a smaller file.
Ways to resize
Longest edge presets
The quickest option. Set the long side and the short side follows:
| Preset | Good for |
|---|---|
| 3840 px | 4K screens, high-quality archive copies |
| 2560 px | Retina laptop displays, portfolio sites |
| 1920 px | Full-width website images (default) |
| 1280 px | Blog posts, email |
| 1080 px | Social media posts |
| 800 px | Inline web images, forums |
| 512 px | Thumbnails, avatars, icons |
Exact width × height
Need precisely 1200 × 800 for a template? Type it in. With aspect ratio lock on, your photo fits within the box without being stretched. Choose fill to cover the whole box and crop the overflow, which is how the 1080 × 1080 and 1920 × 1080 pages work.
Percentage
Scale everything by the same amount, such as 50%. Handy when a batch contains mixed sizes and you just want them all lighter.
No accidental upscaling
If a photo is already smaller than the size you choose, we leave its dimensions alone. Enlarging adds blur, not detail, so it only happens if you explicitly ask for it.
Keep HEIC, or convert as you go
Output JPG for compatibility, PNG for lossless edits, WebP for the web, or stay in HEIC. HEIC output is slower and has no quality slider since it’s encoded by an in-browser HEVC encoder, but it keeps files small for your own library.
Resized locally
The resizing runs in Web Workers on your own machine, so a batch of a few hundred photos is limited only by your device, not by an upload speed. Nothing is sent to us.