How to resize an image without distorting it
Resizing changes the number of pixels in an image, the small dots that make up the picture. A typical phone photo is about 4000 pixels wide. Most screens show far fewer: a laptop is often 1400 to 1900 pixels wide, a phone even less.
Plume always keeps the proportions of your image. You give a maximum width, a maximum height, or both, and Plume calculates the other side so nothing is stretched or squashed. You can also use a percentage: 50% makes the image half as wide and half as tall.
Plume only makes images smaller. Making a small image bigger cannot add detail that was never there; it just produces a blurry, heavier file.
Which size should you choose?
Some useful reference points:
- Website or blog: 1200 to 2000 pixels wide for a large image, 600 to 800 for an image inside the text.
- E-mail: 1200 to 1600 pixels is plenty for photos people will view on screen.
- Social networks: around 1080 pixels wide is a common size, and the platforms resize the rest themselves.
- Online form or ID photo: check the size the site asks for. When it gives none, 1000 to 1500 pixels is usually enough to stay readable.
- Printing: keep the full size. Printers need many pixels to stay sharp.
If you are unsure, try 1600 pixels wide: it stays sharp on almost any screen.
Resizing is the fastest way to make a photo lighter
Halving the width and height of a photo removes three quarters of its pixels. The file shrinks accordingly, often far more than by lowering the quality alone. That is why a 5 MB photo resized to 1600 pixels can drop to a few hundred KB without looking any worse on screen.
For the best result, combine both: resize to the size you really need, then compress. Plume does the two in the same step, with the same quality presets as the image compressor. Your image keeps its original format, unless you choose another one with the image converter.
Resize many images at once
Preparing product photos for an online shop, pictures for a property listing or images for a newsletter? Drop them all at once. Plume applies the same maximum width or height to every image, whatever its orientation, and lets you download everything as a ZIP.
Portrait and landscape photos are handled correctly: with a maximum of 1600 pixels on both sides, a landscape photo will be 1600 pixels wide and a portrait photo 1600 pixels tall. Images already smaller than the limit are not enlarged.
Private and free
Unlike most online tools that upload your files, Plume resizes images inside your browser. Your photos never leave your device, and the tool even works offline once the page has loaded. EXIF metadata, including GPS location, is removed by default, while the orientation of the photo is kept correct.
No account, no watermark, no daily limit. JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and iPhone HEIC files are all accepted.
Pixels, dimensions and file size explained
Three notions are often confused:
- Dimensions are the width and height of the image in pixels, for example 4032 × 3024.
- File size is the weight of the file on disk, in KB or MB.
- Resolution for print (DPI) only tells a printer how large to print the pixels. It does not change anything on screen.
When a website asks for an image “under 1 MB”, it is talking about file size. When it asks for “1080 × 1080”, it is talking about dimensions. Resizing changes the dimensions and, as a result, makes the file lighter. Compression lowers the file size without touching the dimensions. Plume lets you do one or both at the same time.