Everyone knows images are critical to a profitable ecommerce business. But do you know how critical?
Car marketing company Spyne says that “Product images have a significant impact on conversion rates, with studies showing that high-quality images increase conversions by up to 60%.” Plus, says Zipdo, “91% of consumers aged 18-34 trust online reviews and visual content as much as personal recommendations” and “The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.”
According to Hyperise, “Personalized imagery has been shown to decrease cart abandonment rates by 17%, boost click through rates by 150% and improve conversion rates by 200%.”
In other words, using cookies to serve customers with ads that reflect their personal styles or needs can skyrocket your sales, but it means you need a raft of images specific to the settings for which they’re needed.
If you’re thinking, wow, I better step up my image game, then you’re on the right track. Good photos can make or break your ecommerce listings, online ads, and social media engagement. However, if you want to avoid taking a new product photo for each channel – which can be extremely costly– you can make your product photos go further by utilizing an image resizer. This will help you transform a single product photo into multiple robust assets that work for specific sites and goals.
This strategy is applicable to cosmetics, food and beverage products, holiday goodies, and pretty much any other item you’d want to sell in the online space. As such, it’s one you can’t afford to miss out on.
Good news: we’re here today to talk about which image resizer is best for you. But before we do that, we’ll take a look at several other important concepts related to image size: why it matters, how it works, and some additional considerations you won’t want to overlook.
Ready to become an expert on image resizing? Grab a cup of coffee, your favorite trusty note-taking tool, and dig in.
Why Does Image Resizing Matter?
Before you launch into the task of finding the perfect image resizer, let’s talk about the importance of why you should be optimizing and resizing your content to begin with!
Do you really need a whole tool just to change the size of your photos? Hasn’t Photoshop allowed you to do this for decades? Can’t Microsoft Paint perform the same service in less time than it takes to download and learn a new program?
The answers to the above questions are no, yes, and yes. There are other options on the market and you don’t need a dedicated tool to change the size of images. However, if you stick to those standard approaches, you’ll get antiquated results. These include:
{{resizer-ad="/external-components"}}
Large Files Sizes
High-resolution photos from phones come out at about 2,000 pixels wide or tall, while cameras produce images on the order of 3,000, 4,000, 6,000 pixels or greater.
Yet almost no online application calls for images that big. A full-width website photo should only be 1,920, for example. Unfortunately, too many companies simply upload the original photo and call it good, unwilling to size it down because the results are so often disappointing (more on this below).
That creates problems. Improperly sized images are bloated, taking up more than their share of bandwidth while loading on web pages and in email bodies. This makes the whole page or email load slowly, which is frustrating for users. If there are too many large images on your site, it can cause the whole thing to bog down.
This isn’t just annoying; it’s seriously damaging to your conversion rate. According to an Imperva study, “Visitors will only stick around for five seconds (or less) while they wait for a page to load completely, and 27 percent will wait only three seconds.” In total, 62 percent of customers will leave after five seconds.
Even more shockingly, “the data shows that shoppers value website speed over everything else – including security.” So you simply can’t have oversized images weighing down your page.
Blurriness and Pixelation
Another common problem with improperly sized images is how they render on screens. If you upload them too large, the application – say, Instagram, Shopify, or your website – will size it down for you. The basic approach they take to file compression often results in serious loss of data and a blurry image.
The opposite problem is true as well. When you upload a file that is too small, the application will simply stretch it out bigger. Essentially, they do this quickly by pulling apart the pixels that make up the photo and adding more of the same color in, which is why it appears blocky and grainy. You face loss of data in a different way, with sacrificed resolution.
For these reasons, a properly sized image exists in a pretty small range. Photos should be within a few hundred pixels of the specified dimensions of a particular application or you will pay a price.
Incorrect Dimensions
Speaking of dimensions, this is another reason it’s important to know how to resize images.
For example, if you have a 2,000 x 2,000 pixel photograph and you want it to fit in an Instagram story, then you’ll need to resize it to the proper dimensions of 1080 x 1920 pixels. If you don’t resize it yourself, then Instagram will do it for you, and often not with the attention to detail you would give it yourself.
So, what are the ways you can resize an image? Let’s take a look.
Image Resizing: The Crash Course
Before you select your image resizer, let’s consider the three basic transformations for which you might use it: scaling down, upsizing, and cropping.
- Scaling down: When you want to make an image significantly smaller, you need a tool that will assess the defining features of the image and preserve them in the final product. To do this well requires AI, as standard photo editing tools often miss important details.
- Upsizing: Upsizing is even trickier. Historically, if you wanted to expand a 1,000-pixel image to 2,000 pixels, you could basically guarantee a grainy result. Again, an AI-based tool will prevent degradation and help you recreate your original photo with clarity and vibrancy.
- Cropping: The last purpose for which you might use an image resizer is cropping. Although this can be done perfectly well in a standard photo editor, if you want to adjust the size at the same time, you will need a better image resizer tool.
Additional Considerations When Resizing Images
Let’s take a look at a few final considerations before turning our attention to the best image resizers available today.
Changing Backgrounds
One of the best ways to repurpose your photos is to recreate them to match the needs of different seasons, holidays, and sales. For instance, let’s say you sell a canned beverage. During the holiday season, you might photograph this product on a red or green background to keep it seasonally relevant. But, what happens in the spring when you want to match to your brand colors? Or, maybe you want to have your product against pastel backgrounds?
You can strip out the background and update this photo in numerous ways. For example, you could:
- Remove the background to create a simple white or transparent hero image
- Change the background to seasonal or brand colors
- Use a plain white, black, or colored background for big sales like Black Friday, where you want to use text in the image
Each of these can turn one simple product photo into limitless variations for use on your ecommerce platforms and social sites.
What does this have to do with resizing? Simple. Once you’ve cropped out the background, you can reduce or enlarge your image to meet the dictates of the platform on which you’re sharing.
Depending on the difficulty of sizing up or down your photo, you may wish to wait to add the new backdrop in until you’re done to minimize the work your image resizer has to do.
Creating Channel-Specific Variants
Another need that an image resizer can meet is to create channel-specific variants. This means resizing and cropping your images to meet the exact specifications of the website, ecommerce listing, social media channel, or online ad.
The right tool will help you take one photo and turn it into as many as you need for your omnichannel approach.
Enlarging Your Product Image Database
Studies show that companies struggle mightily to produce enough content to match the demands of online marketing, ecommerce listings, seasonal holidays and sales, and the changing sensibilities of their customers.
Indeed, says Venngage, nearly 32% of content marketers chose producing consistent visual content as their biggest challenge – followed by writing copy, “finding the right layout for their data, statistics or copy,” and “great design.”
It’s true that this challenge is lessened when you’re talking about ecommerce listings, which can remain static for long periods of time – as opposed to, say, blogs and social feeds, which need constant updating to feed the hungry maw that is the internet. Without a rolling inventory of different images, you will find yourself quickly stagnating.
Happily, you can resolve this issue pretty quickly when you resize images to recycle them for different platforms, especially if you combine that with inserting different backgrounds, cropping them in interesting ways, and repurposing them for thumbnails, videos that use a succession of photos, product data sheets, and so on.
Just something to keep in mind before looking for a free image resizer, because a good one really can give you the flexibility you require to keep your content marketing engine alive and adorn your product listings beautifully at the same time.
The 9 Best Apps & Tools for Image Resizing
Let's cut to the chase. When you're on the hunt for a reliable image resizer, where should you look? Here, we present nine of our preferred apps and tools available today.
1. soona
No matter the platform or social media channel you post and sell on, soona's free image resizer is your go-to solution to make sure you’re always posting optimized content. Our objective is to assist you in crafting top-notch listing images suitable for any platform.
Utilizing an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, the Image Resizer from soona effortlessly adjusts photo dimensions without compromising quality. It preserves sharpness and vibrancy, adapting seamlessly to your color palette, product variety, or aesthetic preferences. Best of all, it comes at no cost for all users.
2. PicResize
Another free image resizer that uses a drag-and-drop system, PicResize helps you perform a number of tasks. You can resize and crop, flip and rotate, reduce file size, or convert your graphics into a wide range of file types.
While some users report liking the tool, others say that it has too many bugs, glitches out while downloading, and gets the sizing wrong sometimes.
3. Fotor
More straightforward than PicResize, the goal of Fotor is to help you resize your photo easily without losing image quality or aspect ratio – i.e. the dimensions of the photo. It is fast, simple, effective, and avoids cropping, so you preserve all the important details in the original photo.
One of Fotor’s best qualities is its batch resizing feature, where it takes a single photo and spits out appropriately sized versions for a range of social media channels.
4. Photoshop
While Adobe software is a gold standard for editing creative of any kind, and while Photoshop has been around for more than a hot minute, it does suffer from some serious drawbacks as an image resizer.
For one thing, while you can increase and decrease the size and resolution of the image by adjusting the pixel dimensions (adding or reducing the number in the new version), this can result in some seriously bulky files. They may take a long time to download to your device and could slow down load times on your website or other channels – although Photoshop’s recent turn to generative AI is helping to combat this.
5. Pixlr
Pixlr is a pretty big deal right now because it combines so many of the image editing tools users want, all in one place. Think batch editing, animation, image generation, enhancement, and more, all powered by AI for desktop and smartphone.
While it does have an admirable number of features on offer, some users feel that makes the app confusing to learn. Plus, many of its best features are gated, so even though you can use the app for free, you can’t truly leverage its power without paying.
6. PhotoResizer
This app offers the standard features you’d expect from any online image resizer: shrinking, growing, cropping, and pre-defined templates for various social platforms or basic shapes. “There are also some basic editing functions,” says the PhotoResizer website, including “free draw, add text, rotate, flip and draw rectangles.”
However, while the app itself is well-liked by users, the ads are reportedly intrusive, becoming more so over time. For those who want a clean working environment, it might not be the best choice.
7. Picsart
Picsart is powerful and flexible, well-loved by its users for the raft of abilities its AI-backed software brings to bear. These include background removal, text-to-image generation, free images and templates, fonts and stickers, brand colors, and more.
Prepare to pay for it, though. Its free version is pretty limited, while its higher-tier versions require you to pay per seat, which can quickly add up.
8. Image Size
Taking a basic approach to resizing, Image Size offers robust but limited capabilities, including resizing, setting different output units of measurement, preserving your aspect ratio, and sharing in different formats. The results are good, though, as attested by its many positive reviews.
One of the main downsides of Image Size is that it’s not available for desktop. You can get it on Google Play or in the App Store, and it will only work for phones and tablets. If that’s enough flexibility for you, however, you might find it well-equipped to handle your image resizer needs.
9. Resize Me!
Another app that is available only for mobile, Resize Me! is available for both Google Play and Apple. It also takes a very straightforward approach to image sizing, helping you to scale up or down and crop your images appropriately. One of its best features is batch resizing.
Although it gets the job done and has a number of positive reviews, users do sometimes complain that its user interface isn’t clear, that updates cause problems, and that the resized photos are of worse quality than the original. Of the options in this list, it is not the most favorably reviewed.
Wondering which is the best image resizer? It’s right there in the name: Image Resizer from soona!
The Free Image Resizer Your Marketing Team Is Missing
Image Resizer is the answer to getting your content optimized for whatever you sell, wherever you sell. The best part is… it’s free. Plus, we’ve paired it with platform-specific specs & image dimension guides for the biggest online platforms – think Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, and the main social channels. Not only do we have written guides for every major platform and marketplace, but we built in the logic to our Image Resizer tool so you never again have to wonder how to resize your content.
It's now possible to take one photo and make it pixel perfect for any other application. Combined with our range of media editing tools, like changing the background color or removing the background altogether, you’re completely set to make your content go even further for every product you sell.
Wondering if your images are working? There’s an app for that! The new Listing Insights tool from soona, which can help you determine what’s reaching your customers and what isn’t. As you resize and repurpose photos for different channels, it will help you measure exactly how your images are performing on Amazon (and Shopify… coming soon).
Not only is this an invaluable help to your individual platform sales, but it will give you a good look at how those images are perceived by your audience overall. It’s the perfect accompaniment to our other tools, especially the free image resizer, for understanding exactly what your business calls for in today’s bustling global marketplace.
Don’t wait: say hello to soona’s free image resizer. Get started today!
Everyone knows images are critical to a profitable ecommerce business. But do you know how critical?
Car marketing company Spyne says that “Product images have a significant impact on conversion rates, with studies showing that high-quality images increase conversions by up to 60%.” Plus, says Zipdo, “91% of consumers aged 18-34 trust online reviews and visual content as much as personal recommendations” and “The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.”
According to Hyperise, “Personalized imagery has been shown to decrease cart abandonment rates by 17%, boost click through rates by 150% and improve conversion rates by 200%.”
In other words, using cookies to serve customers with ads that reflect their personal styles or needs can skyrocket your sales, but it means you need a raft of images specific to the settings for which they’re needed.
If you’re thinking, wow, I better step up my image game, then you’re on the right track. Good photos can make or break your ecommerce listings, online ads, and social media engagement. However, if you want to avoid taking a new product photo for each channel – which can be extremely costly– you can make your product photos go further by utilizing an image resizer. This will help you transform a single product photo into multiple robust assets that work for specific sites and goals.
This strategy is applicable to cosmetics, food and beverage products, holiday goodies, and pretty much any other item you’d want to sell in the online space. As such, it’s one you can’t afford to miss out on.
Good news: we’re here today to talk about which image resizer is best for you. But before we do that, we’ll take a look at several other important concepts related to image size: why it matters, how it works, and some additional considerations you won’t want to overlook.
Ready to become an expert on image resizing? Grab a cup of coffee, your favorite trusty note-taking tool, and dig in.
Why Does Image Resizing Matter?
Before you launch into the task of finding the perfect image resizer, let’s talk about the importance of why you should be optimizing and resizing your content to begin with!
Do you really need a whole tool just to change the size of your photos? Hasn’t Photoshop allowed you to do this for decades? Can’t Microsoft Paint perform the same service in less time than it takes to download and learn a new program?
The answers to the above questions are no, yes, and yes. There are other options on the market and you don’t need a dedicated tool to change the size of images. However, if you stick to those standard approaches, you’ll get antiquated results. These include:
{{resizer-ad="/external-components"}}
Large Files Sizes
High-resolution photos from phones come out at about 2,000 pixels wide or tall, while cameras produce images on the order of 3,000, 4,000, 6,000 pixels or greater.
Yet almost no online application calls for images that big. A full-width website photo should only be 1,920, for example. Unfortunately, too many companies simply upload the original photo and call it good, unwilling to size it down because the results are so often disappointing (more on this below).
That creates problems. Improperly sized images are bloated, taking up more than their share of bandwidth while loading on web pages and in email bodies. This makes the whole page or email load slowly, which is frustrating for users. If there are too many large images on your site, it can cause the whole thing to bog down.
This isn’t just annoying; it’s seriously damaging to your conversion rate. According to an Imperva study, “Visitors will only stick around for five seconds (or less) while they wait for a page to load completely, and 27 percent will wait only three seconds.” In total, 62 percent of customers will leave after five seconds.
Even more shockingly, “the data shows that shoppers value website speed over everything else – including security.” So you simply can’t have oversized images weighing down your page.
Blurriness and Pixelation
Another common problem with improperly sized images is how they render on screens. If you upload them too large, the application – say, Instagram, Shopify, or your website – will size it down for you. The basic approach they take to file compression often results in serious loss of data and a blurry image.
The opposite problem is true as well. When you upload a file that is too small, the application will simply stretch it out bigger. Essentially, they do this quickly by pulling apart the pixels that make up the photo and adding more of the same color in, which is why it appears blocky and grainy. You face loss of data in a different way, with sacrificed resolution.
For these reasons, a properly sized image exists in a pretty small range. Photos should be within a few hundred pixels of the specified dimensions of a particular application or you will pay a price.
Incorrect Dimensions
Speaking of dimensions, this is another reason it’s important to know how to resize images.
For example, if you have a 2,000 x 2,000 pixel photograph and you want it to fit in an Instagram story, then you’ll need to resize it to the proper dimensions of 1080 x 1920 pixels. If you don’t resize it yourself, then Instagram will do it for you, and often not with the attention to detail you would give it yourself.
So, what are the ways you can resize an image? Let’s take a look.
Image Resizing: The Crash Course
Before you select your image resizer, let’s consider the three basic transformations for which you might use it: scaling down, upsizing, and cropping.
- Scaling down: When you want to make an image significantly smaller, you need a tool that will assess the defining features of the image and preserve them in the final product. To do this well requires AI, as standard photo editing tools often miss important details.
- Upsizing: Upsizing is even trickier. Historically, if you wanted to expand a 1,000-pixel image to 2,000 pixels, you could basically guarantee a grainy result. Again, an AI-based tool will prevent degradation and help you recreate your original photo with clarity and vibrancy.
- Cropping: The last purpose for which you might use an image resizer is cropping. Although this can be done perfectly well in a standard photo editor, if you want to adjust the size at the same time, you will need a better image resizer tool.
Additional Considerations When Resizing Images
Let’s take a look at a few final considerations before turning our attention to the best image resizers available today.
Changing Backgrounds
One of the best ways to repurpose your photos is to recreate them to match the needs of different seasons, holidays, and sales. For instance, let’s say you sell a canned beverage. During the holiday season, you might photograph this product on a red or green background to keep it seasonally relevant. But, what happens in the spring when you want to match to your brand colors? Or, maybe you want to have your product against pastel backgrounds?
You can strip out the background and update this photo in numerous ways. For example, you could:
- Remove the background to create a simple white or transparent hero image
- Change the background to seasonal or brand colors
- Use a plain white, black, or colored background for big sales like Black Friday, where you want to use text in the image
Each of these can turn one simple product photo into limitless variations for use on your ecommerce platforms and social sites.
What does this have to do with resizing? Simple. Once you’ve cropped out the background, you can reduce or enlarge your image to meet the dictates of the platform on which you’re sharing.
Depending on the difficulty of sizing up or down your photo, you may wish to wait to add the new backdrop in until you’re done to minimize the work your image resizer has to do.
Creating Channel-Specific Variants
Another need that an image resizer can meet is to create channel-specific variants. This means resizing and cropping your images to meet the exact specifications of the website, ecommerce listing, social media channel, or online ad.
The right tool will help you take one photo and turn it into as many as you need for your omnichannel approach.
Enlarging Your Product Image Database
Studies show that companies struggle mightily to produce enough content to match the demands of online marketing, ecommerce listings, seasonal holidays and sales, and the changing sensibilities of their customers.
Indeed, says Venngage, nearly 32% of content marketers chose producing consistent visual content as their biggest challenge – followed by writing copy, “finding the right layout for their data, statistics or copy,” and “great design.”
It’s true that this challenge is lessened when you’re talking about ecommerce listings, which can remain static for long periods of time – as opposed to, say, blogs and social feeds, which need constant updating to feed the hungry maw that is the internet. Without a rolling inventory of different images, you will find yourself quickly stagnating.
Happily, you can resolve this issue pretty quickly when you resize images to recycle them for different platforms, especially if you combine that with inserting different backgrounds, cropping them in interesting ways, and repurposing them for thumbnails, videos that use a succession of photos, product data sheets, and so on.
Just something to keep in mind before looking for a free image resizer, because a good one really can give you the flexibility you require to keep your content marketing engine alive and adorn your product listings beautifully at the same time.
The 9 Best Apps & Tools for Image Resizing
Let's cut to the chase. When you're on the hunt for a reliable image resizer, where should you look? Here, we present nine of our preferred apps and tools available today.
1. soona
No matter the platform or social media channel you post and sell on, soona's free image resizer is your go-to solution to make sure you’re always posting optimized content. Our objective is to assist you in crafting top-notch listing images suitable for any platform.
Utilizing an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, the Image Resizer from soona effortlessly adjusts photo dimensions without compromising quality. It preserves sharpness and vibrancy, adapting seamlessly to your color palette, product variety, or aesthetic preferences. Best of all, it comes at no cost for all users.
2. PicResize
Another free image resizer that uses a drag-and-drop system, PicResize helps you perform a number of tasks. You can resize and crop, flip and rotate, reduce file size, or convert your graphics into a wide range of file types.
While some users report liking the tool, others say that it has too many bugs, glitches out while downloading, and gets the sizing wrong sometimes.
3. Fotor
More straightforward than PicResize, the goal of Fotor is to help you resize your photo easily without losing image quality or aspect ratio – i.e. the dimensions of the photo. It is fast, simple, effective, and avoids cropping, so you preserve all the important details in the original photo.
One of Fotor’s best qualities is its batch resizing feature, where it takes a single photo and spits out appropriately sized versions for a range of social media channels.
4. Photoshop
While Adobe software is a gold standard for editing creative of any kind, and while Photoshop has been around for more than a hot minute, it does suffer from some serious drawbacks as an image resizer.
For one thing, while you can increase and decrease the size and resolution of the image by adjusting the pixel dimensions (adding or reducing the number in the new version), this can result in some seriously bulky files. They may take a long time to download to your device and could slow down load times on your website or other channels – although Photoshop’s recent turn to generative AI is helping to combat this.
5. Pixlr
Pixlr is a pretty big deal right now because it combines so many of the image editing tools users want, all in one place. Think batch editing, animation, image generation, enhancement, and more, all powered by AI for desktop and smartphone.
While it does have an admirable number of features on offer, some users feel that makes the app confusing to learn. Plus, many of its best features are gated, so even though you can use the app for free, you can’t truly leverage its power without paying.
6. PhotoResizer
This app offers the standard features you’d expect from any online image resizer: shrinking, growing, cropping, and pre-defined templates for various social platforms or basic shapes. “There are also some basic editing functions,” says the PhotoResizer website, including “free draw, add text, rotate, flip and draw rectangles.”
However, while the app itself is well-liked by users, the ads are reportedly intrusive, becoming more so over time. For those who want a clean working environment, it might not be the best choice.
7. Picsart
Picsart is powerful and flexible, well-loved by its users for the raft of abilities its AI-backed software brings to bear. These include background removal, text-to-image generation, free images and templates, fonts and stickers, brand colors, and more.
Prepare to pay for it, though. Its free version is pretty limited, while its higher-tier versions require you to pay per seat, which can quickly add up.
8. Image Size
Taking a basic approach to resizing, Image Size offers robust but limited capabilities, including resizing, setting different output units of measurement, preserving your aspect ratio, and sharing in different formats. The results are good, though, as attested by its many positive reviews.
One of the main downsides of Image Size is that it’s not available for desktop. You can get it on Google Play or in the App Store, and it will only work for phones and tablets. If that’s enough flexibility for you, however, you might find it well-equipped to handle your image resizer needs.
9. Resize Me!
Another app that is available only for mobile, Resize Me! is available for both Google Play and Apple. It also takes a very straightforward approach to image sizing, helping you to scale up or down and crop your images appropriately. One of its best features is batch resizing.
Although it gets the job done and has a number of positive reviews, users do sometimes complain that its user interface isn’t clear, that updates cause problems, and that the resized photos are of worse quality than the original. Of the options in this list, it is not the most favorably reviewed.
Wondering which is the best image resizer? It’s right there in the name: Image Resizer from soona!
The Free Image Resizer Your Marketing Team Is Missing
Image Resizer is the answer to getting your content optimized for whatever you sell, wherever you sell. The best part is… it’s free. Plus, we’ve paired it with platform-specific specs & image dimension guides for the biggest online platforms – think Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, and the main social channels. Not only do we have written guides for every major platform and marketplace, but we built in the logic to our Image Resizer tool so you never again have to wonder how to resize your content.
It's now possible to take one photo and make it pixel perfect for any other application. Combined with our range of media editing tools, like changing the background color or removing the background altogether, you’re completely set to make your content go even further for every product you sell.
Wondering if your images are working? There’s an app for that! The new Listing Insights tool from soona, which can help you determine what’s reaching your customers and what isn’t. As you resize and repurpose photos for different channels, it will help you measure exactly how your images are performing on Amazon (and Shopify… coming soon).
Not only is this an invaluable help to your individual platform sales, but it will give you a good look at how those images are perceived by your audience overall. It’s the perfect accompaniment to our other tools, especially the free image resizer, for understanding exactly what your business calls for in today’s bustling global marketplace.
Don’t wait: say hello to soona’s free image resizer. Get started today!
