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