How to Resize an Image Without Losing Quality
Updated October 2026
A photo straight from a phone is often far bigger than a website, an email or a form needs. Resizing it takes a minute and can be done on your own device, without uploading the picture anywhere. The trick is to do it in the right direction and to keep the proportions.
Resize an image in four steps
- Open the Image Resizer.
- Choose your image, or drag it onto the page.
- Type the new width or the new height. With the aspect ratio locked, the other number follows by itself.
- Download the resized image.
Smaller stays sharp, bigger gets soft
Making an image smaller throws away pixels you do not need, and the result still looks sharp. Making an image larger works the other way round: the picture contains no extra detail, so the new pixels are guesses and the image can look soft or blurry. Whenever you can, start from the biggest original you have and shrink it.
Keep the aspect ratio locked
The aspect ratio is the relation between width and height. If you change only one of them without the other, people in the photo end up looking tall and thin or short and wide. Leave the lock on and the tool changes the second number for you. Unlock it only when you really want a different shape, and in that case cropping is usually the better choice.
Which size should you pick?
| Use | A common starting point |
|---|---|
| Photo in an email | 1200 to 1600 pixels on the longest side |
| Picture on a web page | Around the width it is shown at, often 800 to 1600 pixels |
| Profile picture | A square, for example 400 by 400 pixels |
| Thumbnail | A few hundred pixels wide |
These are starting points, not rules. If a website or form states a size, use that one.
Resize first, then compress
Pixels and file size are two different things. Resizing changes how many pixels the image has, and that already makes the file much smaller. If it is still too big, run it through the Image Compressor afterwards.