Most image jobs are small: shrink a photo for an email, crop it to a social size, cut out a background, turn an iPhone HEIC into a JPG. You don't need Photoshop for any of that, and you don't need to upload your photos to a stranger's server either. Every tool on this list from us runs in your browser, so the file stays on your device, and none of them adds a watermark. Where an outside tool is the better pick, we say so.
Here's the short list, sorted by how often people need each job. The last column is the honest catch, because every free tool has one.
| Job | Free tool | What it does well | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Make a photo smaller | Image Compressor | JPEG, PNG or WebP out, quality 1 to 100, optional max width and height | One image at a time; PNG output is lossless, so convert to WebP for big savings |
| Crop to a social size | Image Cropper | Presets like YouTube 1280×720 and Instagram 1080×1080 | Crops and resizes only, no filters |
| Remove a background | Background Remover | Transparent PNG, white or custom color, no watermark | Model is trained on portraits; fine hair and glass come out soft |
| Enlarge a small image | Image Upscaler | 2x or 4x with an 867 KB ESRGAN model | Input capped at 2,000 px long side for 2x, 1,200 px for 4x |
| Open iPhone photos anywhere | HEIC to JPG | Batch conversion with libheif in WebAssembly | Output is JPG, so Live Photo motion is dropped |
| Strip GPS and camera data | Image Metadata Remover | Re-saves a clean copy with no EXIF | Re-encoding JPEG costs a tiny bit of quality |
| Check what metadata a photo has | EXIF Viewer | Camera, lens, timestamps, GPS | Read only; use the remover to clean |
| Watermark your photos | Image Watermark | Text, opacity, position, diagonal tiling | Text only, no logo upload |
| Turn a logo into a vector | Image to SVG | Traces PNG or JPG into SVG paths | Great on flat logos, messy on photos |
| Shrink SVG files | SVG Optimizer | Strips editor junk, merges paths | SVG only |
| Make a favicon set | Favicon Generator | .ico, 180 px Apple icon, 192 and 512 px manifest icons | Non-square images get fitted to a square, so start square |
| Grab a color from a photo | Image Color Picker | HEX, RGB and HSL from any pixel | One color at a time |
| Copy text out of a picture | Image to Text (OCR) | Tesseract, 100+ languages | Handwriting is hit and miss |
| Find duplicate photos | Duplicate Image Finder | Perceptual hashing catches resized copies | Doesn't delete anything for you |
| Find where a photo appears online | Reverse Image Search | Opens Google Lens, Bing, TinEye and Yandex at once | Needs a public image URL; for a local file, use each engine's upload button |
Plenty of them do. The usual pattern is simple: you drop a file, it goes to a server, the server does the work, and you download the result. The site promises to delete it after an hour or a day. That's often fine. It's less fine for a passport scan, a photo of your kids or a client's unreleased product shot.
Browser-based tools work differently. The page downloads the code, and sometimes a small AI model, then does the processing on your own machine. You can test any site in ten seconds: load the tool, turn on airplane mode, then run the job. If you still get a result, the photo never left your device. Everything from us in the table above passes that test, apart from the reverse image search, which has to talk to the search engines by design.
More than most people expect, and the biggest win usually isn't the quality slider. It's the pixel count. A typical 12-megapixel phone photo is 4,032 by 3,024 pixels. If it's going on a web page that shows it 1,200 pixels wide, it's carrying about 11 times more pixels than anyone will see.
| Width you resize to | Pixels (4:3 photo) | Share of the original 12.2 MP | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4,032 px (original) | 12.2 million | 100% | Printing, archiving |
| 2,048 px | 3.1 million | 26% | Full-screen on most laptops |
| 1,600 px | 1.9 million | 16% | Blog hero images |
| 1,200 px | 1.1 million | 9% | In-article photos, email |
| 800 px | 0.48 million | 4% | Thumbnails, product grids |
File size doesn't fall exactly in step with pixels, but it falls roughly that way. Resize first, then pick WebP at a quality of 75 to 85, and you'll usually end up with a file a small fraction of the original. Our image format guide explains when JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF makes sense.
Single-purpose tools are quick because they do one thing. Once you need layers, masks, healing, text on a curve or careful color work, you want a real editor. The two free ones worth knowing are GIMP, a desktop program for Windows, Mac and Linux, and Photopea, a browser editor that opens PSD files and feels a lot like Photoshop. Photopea is free with ads. Inkscape is the free pick if you're drawing vectors rather than editing photos.
A good rule: if you can describe the job in three words ("crop to square", "remove the background", "make it smaller"), use a single tool. If it takes a sentence, open an editor.
Two of the tools above use small AI models: the background remover and the upscaler. They run in your browser, which keeps them private and free, but they're smaller than the server models paid services use. That shows up in the hard cases: flyaway hair, glass and very blurry source images. For a profile photo or a product shot on a plain wall, the free versions are usually enough. If you're deciding between free and paid for these jobs, our remove.bg alternatives and upscaling guide compare them.
If you're trying to work out whether a picture someone sent you was made by AI, the AI Image Detector reads its metadata for generator tags and provenance hints. It's a first check, not a verdict, since metadata is easy to strip.
For full layer-based editing, GIMP on the desktop and Photopea in the browser are the two free options most people end up with. For single jobs like compressing, cropping or removing a background, a dedicated tool is faster because there's nothing to learn.
It depends on where the work happens. Many free sites upload your photo to their server, process it there and delete it later. Tools that run in your browser never send the file anywhere. You can check by loading the page, switching on airplane mode and running the job. If it still works, nothing was uploaded.
Convert it to WebP at a quality setting around 75 to 85 and, if it's bigger than it'll ever be displayed, cap the width too. A 4000-pixel photo shown at 1200 pixels wide is carrying more than ten times the pixels it needs. Resizing usually saves more than any quality slider.
Yes. In-browser background removers such as ours export a transparent PNG at the photo's own size with no watermark. iPhone and Mac users can also long-press the subject in Photos to lift it out. Paid services still do better on fine hair and glass.
Usually because the free tier is a trial for a paid plan. The watermark, a size cap or a low-resolution download is what nudges you to pay. Tools that run entirely in your browser cost very little to operate, so they don't need that nudge.