Cameras today shoot massive photos—20 megapixels, 4000 pixels wide. While great for printing billboards, these are terrible for email attachments or website profiles. You need to resize them.
The Image Resizer allows you to scale images down (or up) with mathematical precision.
Resizing vs Cropping
- Cropping cuts away parts of the image (changing the composition).
- Resizing shrinks the entire image (keeping the composition, changing the pixel count).
Resampling Algorithms
When you shrink an image, the computer has to decide which pixels to throw away and how to blend the remaining ones. The method used affects sharpness.
- Nearest Neighbor: Fast but blocky. Good for pixel art.
- Bilinear: Smooths pixels. Good for medium reductions.
- Bicubic: Sharper gradient handling. Standard for photos.
- Lanczos (Windowed Sinc): The highest quality. Preserves detail and edge sharpness best. Our tool defaults to this.
DPI (Dots Per Inch)
If you are resizing for Print, you care about DPI. A standard screen is 72 DPI. A high-quality magazine print is 300 DPI.
Note: Changing DPI does not change the pixel data, only the metadata instruction for the printer.
Resizing Up (Upscaling)
Can you make a small image bigger?
Traditionally, no—it just gets blurry. However, using our AI Image Upscaler, you can actually add new details. For this standard resizer tool, we recommend only resizing down.