Resize an image to an exact size

Give the width and height you need. If the picture is not that shape, it either crops or gets a border, and the page says which before you press the button. Everything happens in this browser tab.

How it works

Something wants an image of an exact size. A profile picture that must be square, a thumbnail that must be 1280 by 720, a form that will only take 600 by 600. The photo you have is almost never that shape, and what happens next is the whole question: a picture that is not square cannot become square without either losing part of itself or gaining a border.

The third possibility, stretching it to fit, is what most resizers quietly do, and it is the one answer nobody wants. A stretched face is instantly wrong in a way people notice without being able to name. So it is not offered here. Crop to fill keeps the middle and trims the edges, which is what a profile picture or a thumbnail needs. Fit inside keeps the whole picture and puts a border around it, which is what a fixed frame or a print slot needs.

Which one is about to happen is stated before you press the button, not discovered in the download. If the shapes already match, it says that too, and nothing is cropped or padded at all. An upscale is called out separately: making an image larger cannot add detail that was never captured, so the result is softer than the original, and knowing that in advance is usually enough to go and find a bigger source.

The resampling itself is done at the browser’s high-quality setting, which matters more here than in most tools, because changing dimensions is the entire product rather than a side effect of it. Everything happens on your own device, and re-encoding drops the photo’s metadata as a side effect, so the resized copy no longer carries the location it was taken.

How to use it

1 Choose an image, or paste one straight from your clipboard.
2 Type the width and height, or pick one of the common sizes.
3 Choose whether to crop to fill or fit inside a border. The page says what that will do.
4 Press Resize, check the result, and download it.

Good to know

This sets the dimensions, not the file size. For a byte limit, compress the result afterwards.
Crop to fill keeps the centre. If the subject is off to one side, crop it yourself first and then resize.
Making an image bigger cannot add detail. The tool says so rather than pretending otherwise.
Fitting inside adds a white border. Choose PNG if you would rather have transparency than white.
Re-encoding drops the metadata, so the resized copy carries no GPS location.

Browser support

Chrome 94 and later
Firefox 93 and later
Safari 16.4 and later
Edge 94 and later

These are the oldest versions with everything the tool uses. They are worked out from the tool itself, so they change when it does.

Version numbers checked on 2026-09-04.

Three ways to fit a rectangle in a square, and only two of them are honest

The request sounds simple and contains a contradiction. Make this photo 1080 by 1080. The photo is 4032 by 3024, which is 4:3, and no amount of arithmetic turns a 4:3 rectangle into a 1:1 square while keeping every pixel in proportion. Something has to give: either part of the picture leaves the frame, or the frame gains ground the picture does not cover, or the picture is distorted to fill it. Every image resizer answers this question. Most do not tell you which answer they picked.

Stretching is the answer nobody asks for and many tools default to, because it is the one that needs no decision: scale x and y independently until the numbers match. The result is a face 33 percent too wide, and the striking thing is how reliably people notice something is wrong without being able to say what. Faces in particular are processed by dedicated machinery in the visual system that is exquisitely sensitive to proportion, which is why a stretched portrait reads as uncanny while a stretched landscape merely reads as slightly odd.

Cropping to fill is what social platforms do. Scale by the larger of the two ratios so the box is covered, then trim the overflow. The subject stays in proportion and the edges are lost, which is fine for a profile picture where the face is in the middle and wrong for a group photo where someone is standing at the edge. Centring the crop is the only defensible default, since the tool has no idea what the subject is, and saying so plainly is better than pretending the choice was intelligent.

Fitting inside does the opposite: scale by the smaller ratio so the whole picture survives, then fill the remainder with a background. Nothing is lost and the result has bands along two sides. This is what a fixed frame wants, and what a printer expects when the paper is not the aspect ratio of the photograph. The bands are only invisible when the background matches whatever the image will sit on, which is why the colour matters more than it looks like it should.

Rounding deserves a mention because it is where exactness quietly fails. Scale factors are rarely whole numbers, so the computed draw size lands at 249.6 pixels and something has to decide what that means. Rounding the drawn image is fine; rounding the CANVAS is not, because a canvas of 1079 pixels when 1080 was requested breaks the one promise the tool makes. The canvas is therefore set to the requested integers first and the drawing is fitted into it, rather than the other way around. The same applies at the small end: a one-pixel target is legal, and a plan that rounds a dimension to zero would produce a blank image instead of a tiny one.

Frequently asked questions

How do I resize an image to exactly 1080 by 1080?

Choose the picture, type 1080 in both boxes or press the Square 1080 preset, and pick whether to crop or add a border. The output is exactly those dimensions, every time, which is the point of the tool.

Why does my photo get cropped?

Because it is not the shape you asked for. A 4:3 photo cannot fill a square without something leaving the frame. Crop to fill trims the edges and keeps the middle; if you would rather keep all of it, choose Fit inside and it gets a border instead.

Can I resize without cropping or a border?

Only if the picture is already the right shape, in which case both modes do the same thing and the page says so. The alternative would be stretching the image, which distorts everything in it, so it is not offered.

Does making an image bigger improve it?

No. Upscaling invents pixels by interpolating between the ones that exist, so the result is larger and softer, never more detailed. The tool warns when the size you asked for is bigger than the original.

Will this get my file under a size limit?

Not directly. This controls dimensions, and a smaller image is usually a smaller file, but the relationship is not exact. If you need to be under a specific number of kilobytes, use the image compressor, which searches for the quality that fits.

Are my photos uploaded?

No. The image is decoded, redrawn and re-encoded inside this browser tab by your own device. You can watch the Network tab while you work: nothing carrying the photo goes out.

Your files are processed on your device and are not uploaded. You can verify this in your browser’s developer tools under the Network tab.