Import ordinary image files, TIF/TIFF or genuine Canon CR2/CR3 camera RAW,Import ordinary image files,
choose the job you want to do, and follow the on-screen steps.
Photo processing happens in your browser — your images are not uploaded.
Quick start
- Import. Click Import Images or drag one or more supported image files onto the window.
- Choose a task. Use a guided Core Task for the quickest route, or open Advanced for the full creative tools.
- Tweak (optional). Use Edit Images to add alt text, crop, rotate, sharpen or reduce grain.
- Export. Follow the task's final screen to download a ZIP, save loose files to a folder where supported, or create the task's PDF, video, web page or portable file.
That's it for most users. The App's working copy remains available until you delete it, clear the app, or its browser-storage retention period ends. Your source file elsewhere on your device is never changed or deleted.
Choosing the right task
Core Tasks are the simplest guided routes:
- Optimize & Export — keep the same picture but make the file much smaller.
- Make social media images — crop and resize for Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok.
- Make a quote / text card — create a shareable design without needing a photo.
- Images for my website — create responsive WebP/JPG sizes and ready-to-paste HTML.
- Build a photo gallery — create a ready-to-upload gallery or a single portable HTML gallery.
View Gallery and View Images stay above every tab so you can always organise or inspect what you imported. The Core tab also includes quick tools to fit to a shape without cropping, trim blank edges, or add a background.
When choosing images in View Gallery or any tool, use Search to match either the current renamed name or the original imported filename. You can show the most recently added or oldest images first, then use Select visible or Clear visible on the filtered results. Hidden selections are kept, and changing the display order does not silently reorder exported galleries, books or slideshows. On phones, Gallery opens in a spacious Browse view: tap Find & sort or Select only when those controls are needed. Tool pickers use the equivalent compact Find & select button.
Advanced contains Edit Images, the full Gallery builder, PDF Book Maker, Resize & Optimize, Social Media Images, advert/invitation templates, montages, similar-photo review, slideshow video and grids/carousels.
Bonus Features contains print sheets, background removal, one-tap looks, branding, captions, privacy blur/redaction and the Pro website tools. In the hosted Free edition, both paid tabs show their tools with an upgrade prompt. The website icon pack and website-page checker remain Pro-only.
Importing photos
Three ways to bring image files in:
- Drag-and-drop one or more files onto any part of the window.
- Click Import Images on the home view.
- Click Add Your Photo from inside the gallery.
Supported input: JPG/JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF (first frame only), photographic TIF/TIFF, and genuine Canon CR2/CR3 camera RAW. Renaming an unsupported or ordinary file to one of these extensions does not make it valid; the App checks the file's real format. HEIC/HEIF and other camera RAW formats such as NEF, ARW and DNG are intentionally not supported at present.
Supported input in Free: JPG/JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF (first frame only). Renaming an unsupported or ordinary file to one of these extensions does not make it valid; the App checks the file's real format. Photographic TIF/TIFF and genuine Canon CR2/CR3 RAW import are available in Personal and Pro. HEIC/HEIF and other camera RAW formats are intentionally not supported at present.
TIF/TIFF files
- TIFF decoding happens locally in a time-limited background worker. No TIFF is uploaded and no online service is contacted.
- The App accepts common photographic TIFFs that are uncompressed or use PackBits, LZW, Deflate or modern JPEG compression. It reads the first image/page; document-style multi-page TIFFs, old-style JPEG, fax/CCITT compression, layers and unusual scientific colour layouts may not open.
- Unsigned 1–16-bit photographic pixels are accepted. Like every image in the App's current canvas workflow, the editable working copy becomes an upright, high-quality 8-bit WebP. A 16-bit source therefore does not remain a 16-bit editing file.
- Your original
.tif/.tiff remains untouched in its folder. The App does not retain another large TIFF copy in browser storage, which is important when importing many old scans.
- TIFFs over 50 MB can take longer. The safety limits are 250 MB per file, 80 megapixels and 16,384 pixels on either side. Import fewer very large TIFFs together if browser memory is limited.
Canon CR2/CR3 RAW files
- The RAW decoder runs locally in a protected background worker. The file is not uploaded.
- The best camera preview normally appears first. The app then processes the full RAW in the background; the image card tells you whether it is processing full RAW, using the full RAW, or using the camera preview.
- For the highest-detail result, wait until the card says full RAW before editing or exporting. If full processing is unavailable, the camera preview remains usable.
- Precise Crop is available only after the full-resolution RAW working image is ready. While the temporary camera preview is in use, the editor shows that processing status and keeps exact-pixel cropping disabled so a print-sized crop cannot accidentally be made from the smaller preview.
- The untouched CR2/CR3 original is retained only in this browser so local full processing can finish. Normal image exports contain the converted pixels, not the RAW file. Deleting that image or using Delete All Images also removes its retained RAW original.
- RAW files over 50 MB may take longer. The safety limit is 250 MB per RAW file; unusually large dimensions or damaged files are rejected.
The full editions accept up to 100 imported originals; the hosted Free edition accepts up to 12. Imported images are normally saved in this browser for up to 14 days, or until you delete them or choose Delete All Images. If permanent browser storage is unavailable, the app clearly labels the session as temporary — export before closing it.
The gallery
Each imported photo gets a card showing its thumbnail, filename, dimensions, and a small alt-text input. From the card you can:
- View & Edit (eye icon) — opens the full image in the lightbox where most of the work happens.
- Rename (pencil icon) — changes the base filename used in exports. Letters, numbers and hyphens only.
- Delete (bin icon) — removes the image and its locally retained data from the app's browser storage.
- Inline alt text — type a short description for accessibility and SEO. Saves automatically when you click out.
You can also select multiple images with the checkboxes and use the gallery's Export selected button to export just those.
After importing several files, the batch-name panel can give them a tidy numbered sequence. Personal, Pro and Developer also offer a reusable filename pattern using plain buttons for project name, original name, date, number, width and height. The example updates before you save, and filenames are cleaned automatically for safe folders and websites.
Viewing & editing images
There are two full-screen views, both opened from the home screen and both navigable with the arrow keys:
- View Images — a clean viewer for just looking: the picture plus Play jigsaw, Print and Delete. Tapping any photo in the gallery opens this too. On a phone held sideways, the photograph fills the screen and the controls float over it; tap the photograph to hide or restore them.
- Edit Images — the full editor described below (alt text, metadata, crop/rotate, file-size estimate, export).
Alt text
A short description of what's in the image. Gets baked into the generated <picture> snippet as the alt attribute. Critical for screen readers and image search. Two or three concrete words is usually enough — describe what the image is, not "image of …".
More metadata fields (collapsed by default)
Optional fields that get exported as a Schema.org JSON-LD block alongside the <picture> snippet. Fill them in and Google's image search has better information to work with:
- Title — short headline. Also becomes a hover tooltip on the rendered image.
- Description — longer caption.
- Author / Photographer — your name.
- Copyright notice — e.g.
© 2026 Your Name.
- License URL — link to your terms (Creative Commons, etc.).
- Keywords — comma-separated.
Leave any field empty and it's omitted from the output. If all six are empty, no JSON-LD block is generated at all.
Estimate export size & Compare
The bar shows the original file size on the left. Click Estimate export size to run the real export pipeline on this one image and see the actual byte savings. Click Compare to swap the displayed image between original and the encoded preview — useful for checking quality before you commit to a full export.
Edit (crop & rotate)
Opens a dedicated editor with:
- Rotate 90° clockwise / counter-clockwise
- Flip horizontal / vertical
- Crop — drag a region on the image, then drag handles to resize or drag the box to move it. The aspect-ratio chips (Free, 1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2, Original) constrain the crop to common ratios. A rule-of-thirds grid appears inside the crop region as a composition guide.
- Precise crop — enter an exact width and height in original pixels, such as 1600 × 1600, and choose Place exact crop. Drag the fixed-size box over the subject, click elsewhere on the image to centre it there, or use the arrow keys for one-pixel positioning (hold Shift for ten pixels). Saving keeps exactly those source pixels and does not resize or enlarge them.
- Crop & resize — pick a platform target (Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, etc.) or Custom size… to type your own output width × height. A correctly-shaped crop box appears ready to position; on Save the cropped area is resized to exactly that pixel size. A note warns if your selection is smaller than the target (it would be enlarged).
- Enhance — apply Light, Medium or Strong sharpening, reduce grain at the same three strengths, or use Auto-enhance to reduce grain and then sharpen.
Use Undo and Redo while editing (or Ctrl/Cmd+Z and Ctrl/Cmd+Y) to step through crop, rotate, flip, target-size and enhancement choices. Click Save changes to bake the final edits into a new image. Cancel discards. If you cropped a 4000×3000 photo to 1:1, your saved version is exactly the cropped pixels — no upscaling.
Delete / Print / Export this image
The toolbar lets you delete from inside the lightbox (with confirmation), print just this image (uses your printer's print dialog, no app chrome printed), or export this one image as a ZIP using your current export settings.
Image and website export options
Size presets
Pick one from the dropdown:
- Full size — optimise only — keeps the original dimensions and recompresses the image.
- Very large / Large / Medium / Small / Thumbnail — one image at 2000 / 1400 / 1200 / 800 / 400 px respectively (never enlarged past the source).
- Basic responsive set — 400 / 800 / 1200 px.
- Standard responsive set (recommended) — 400 / 800 / 1200 / 1600 px.
- Full responsive set — 400 / 800 / 1200 / 1600 / 2000 px.
Or set a single custom width if you need an exact dimension.
Pro and Developer can also choose Custom responsive set and enter 2–8 widths of their own. These widths are included in Saved setups, making it easy to reuse the same website specification for later projects.
Social media sizes
Tick any sizes you want — the four universal shapes people post everywhere (Square, Portrait, Landscape, Wide landscape) plus the recommended sizes for each platform (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok — stories, headers, covers, thumbnails, Pins and banners). Each ticked size gets centre-cropped and exported as a separate JPG into its own folder inside the ZIP. (For per-photo control over what stays in frame, use the guided Make social media images task and choose Position each photo myself.)
Output controls
Where the chosen task offers image-output settings, the controls include:
- Output format — WebP + JPG (default), WebP only, or JPG only. Developer offers AVIF through localhost. Pro offers AVIF through the included localhost launcher or the protected online Pro version; its login and password are provided on the Start Here page inside the Pro ZIP download. AVIF choices are AVIF only, AVIF + WebP, or AVIF + WebP + JPG. Selecting WebP + JPG never creates an AVIF file.
- Image quality — Smaller files, Balanced or Best quality. Resize keeps the exact per-format sliders visible; Pro/Developer Resize also shows AVIF quality.
- Aim for under — optionally ask the app to reduce quality until each output fits below a target number of KB.
- Maximum width — caps output width; zero means no extra limit.
- Sharpen resized images — gently restores crispness lost while shrinking.
- Folder structure — All in one folder or Per-image folders.
- Resize destination — leave Create an images subfolder off to save directly into the folder you choose (or the ZIP root). Turn it on when you want an additional
images/ folder.
- Watermark and border — see below.
Saved setups remember the complete set of choices for that task, including sizes, formats, exact quality, file-size target, sharpening, folder structure, watermark, border/caption and the reusable batch filename pattern. Applying a setup restores those choices together.
For printing: image resolution and colour depth are different things. The App keeps the chosen pixel dimensions and uses standard 8-bit-per-colour-channel pixels (millions of colours), which suits websites and normal photo printing. Use full-size JPG, the Print command or PDF tools for print. AVIF is intended for website delivery; professional 10/12/16-bit, wide-gamut or ICC-managed printing needs a specialist colour-managed editor and is outside this App’s current workflow.
Watermark
Off by default. Pick a bundled mark (AI Generated, Public Domain, Copyright, Share Freely, Original Work, Sample) or upload your own PNG / SVG. Position is bottom-right (default) or bottom-left only — no centre or full-image overlay. Size and opacity are adjustable. Applies to every exported image and every variant.
Border & web-address caption
Also off by default. Add a coloured matte border, choose its width and corner radius, and optionally print a website address or short caption into the bottom border so it stays attached when the image is shared.
What you get on export
The result depends on the task:
- Optimize & Export / Resize & Optimize — the resized image files only, downloaded as a ZIP or saved as loose files to a chosen folder where the browser supports it.
- Social Media Images — correctly cropped JPG files, grouped by the selected platform/shape.
- Images for my website — responsive WebP/JPG variants, a
.picture.html snippet for each image, and a summary README.
- Build a photo gallery — a complete gallery website folder/ZIP, or one self-contained portable
.html file that can open from a drive, attachment or phone file manager.
- PDF book, slideshow, montage, card and other creative tools — the file type shown on that tool's own final screen.
The gallery's quick Export images action can save JPG, WebP, PNG, or both WebP and JPG. PNG is useful for transparency, logos and fine line art but is usually larger for ordinary photographs. After export, the result screen compares an original and exported preview side by side and reports the original bytes, exported bytes and percentage saved (or increased).
For the website-images task, copy the contents of a .picture.html file into your site's HTML and upload its matching image files.
Make a montage
The Make a montage task combines several photos (up to nine) into one image to print or post. Pick your photos and a size, and they're auto-arranged into a tidy layout. Choose a style:
- Grid - equal-sized cells.
- Mosaic - different-shaped photos that fit together.
- Feature - one large photo in the middle with the rest around it.
Sizes cover the social shapes (Square, Portrait, Landscape, Wide) and common home-printer sizes (6x4, 7x5, 8x6, 10x8, A4, Letter) at 300 dpi. You can drag a photo inside its frame to choose what stays in view, drag one photo onto another to swap them, shuffle the order, add an optional title, and set the gap and background colour. It exports a single image you can save, share, or print.
Make a print sheet (Personal / Pro)
Choose one or more photos, A4, US Letter or 6×4 paper, then select evenly fitted photos, 35×45 mm passport-style, 2×2 inch, wallet or 6×4 size. You can make several copies, add crop marks and optionally print filenames. The App saves accurate 300 dpi PNG pages and does not change the originals.
Review similar photos (Personal / Pro)
This local assistant compares small previews to group likely repeats and shows dimensions, file size and an estimated detail score. It suggests the clearest-looking member of each group, but you make the decision. Nothing is removed automatically; tick photos and confirm only if you want to remove their retained copies from the App. Original files elsewhere on your device are never deleted.
Pro website tools
Make website icon pack turns one image into PNG favicons, Apple and Android app icons, an optional 1200×630 social preview, a web manifest and ready-to-copy HTML. Check a website page reads selected local HTML pages or a website folder without editing it, then reports missing alt text, missing dimensions, responsive-image opportunities, large or missing local files and external image addresses. When you select the folder, it also safely validates JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF files, measures their real dimensions, compares simple pixel size hints and makes temporary WebP/JPG/AVIF trials to estimate possible savings. Developer AVIF measurement uses localhost. Pro can use the included localhost launcher or the protected online Pro version; find its login and password on the Start Here page inside the Pro ZIP download. The report can be saved as Markdown. The checker never fetches the addresses it finds, and its ? Help button explains the limits.
Readability checks for text
The text-on-photo and quote-card tools now give plain-language contrast guidance and warn when important words sit near an edge that a social app or printer may crop. This is a useful design check, not a formal accessibility certification; always inspect the final preview at its intended viewing size.
Playable jigsaw puzzles (Photo Gallery export)
When you build a Photo Gallery web page (the export that produces a ready-to-upload gallery site, not the plain Resize or Social bundles), every photo becomes a playable jigsaw puzzle for your visitors — on by default, with no extra setup, accounts, or plugins.
Difficulty & switching it off
The jigsaw is on by default. In the Photo Gallery export's advanced options you'll find Include a playable jigsaw puzzle under each image already ticked — untick it if you want a gallery without the game. The Default puzzle difficulty dropdown sets the level each puzzle opens at:
- Easy — about 9 pieces.
- Medium — about 16 pieces.
- Hard — about 30 pieces.
This sets the difficulty the puzzle opens at; your visitors can switch between Easy, Medium and Hard at any time while playing. The exact piece count adapts to each photo's shape so the pieces stay a sensible size.
What your visitors see
On the published gallery, a Play jigsaw button appears under each image and inside the image viewer (lightbox). Clicking it opens that photo as a real jigsaw — pieces are scattered, snap together into connected groups as they're placed, and the puzzle celebrates when it's complete. There's a difficulty switcher and a sound toggle inside the puzzle. On a phone held sideways, the play area fills the screen and the full difficulty, Preview, Restart and sound settings sit inside a compact Controls tray; choosing an action closes the tray so play can continue. Everything runs in the visitor's own browser; like the rest of the app it makes no network calls and needs no sign-in.
Speed & what gets exported
The puzzle engine is loaded only when a visitor first clicks Play jigsaw, so it never slows down the initial page load for people who just want to browse. Enabling the option adds two shared files — jigsaw.css and jigsaw.js — into the gallery's shared-code folder (alongside photohelper.css / photohelper.js). Upload the exported gallery folder as you normally would and the puzzles work on your live site automatically.
Privacy
Your images are decoded, resized and processed entirely in your browser — they are never uploaded. Most exports are re-encoded, which removes container metadata such as GPS coordinates, camera information and timestamps. For the strongest metadata-removal assurance in v2.1, choose a resized output or JPG rather than the Full size — optimise only WebP route, which is still listed in the internal security follow-up for hardening.
The app itself makes zero network requests - no analytics, no telemetry. You can verify this in your browser's developer tools (Network tab).
This free version is supported by adverts (such as Google AdSense and Amazon). Those load from the advertisers' own servers and may set cookies, as described in their own notices and the website's privacy & consent settings — so the free version is not request-free. Your photos are unaffected: they are still processed only in your browser and are never sent to us or to any advertiser. Paid/direct-file editions do not automatically load the third-party advert frame or tracking. They retain their existing static product, support and affiliate links; those make a normal web request only if you choose to click them.
Keyboard shortcuts
- Esc — close any overlay (lightbox, editor, gallery, settings)
- ← / → — previous / next image in the lightbox
- Ctrl/Cmd+Z — undo the last change in the image editor
- Ctrl/Cmd+Y or Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z — redo in the image editor
Why image optimisation matters in 2026, how you'd do it by hand
with free tools, and where this app fits in.
Why bother?
An unoptimised modern phone photo is typically 4–10 MB. Modern AI-generated images can be much bigger still — Midjourney's latest output is routinely 7–15 MB per image. A single such photo on your homepage is bigger than the entire HTML, CSS, and JS of most websites combined.
That has four real costs:
- Search rankings. Google uses page speed as a ranking signal and has done since 2018. Slow pages rank lower. The Core Web Vitals metric most affected by images is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — Google explicitly recommends LCP under 2.5 seconds, and a single 8 MB hero image will blow past that on mobile data every time.
- Mobile data. Roughly half your visitors are on a phone. A 50 MB page costs them real money on capped plans, and many will just leave before it loads.
- Bandwidth cost. If you pay for hosting by the GB, oversized images are a direct bill.
- Accessibility. Images without alt text are invisible to screen reader users and to image search.
The manual workflow (without this app)
Here's what proper image optimisation looks like by hand. Per image. Per page.
- Open the photo in a free editor like GIMP, Photopea (a browser-based GIMP-alike) or Krita.
- Crop and rotate to your composition.
- Resize a copy to your largest target width (say 1400 px), without overwriting the original.
- Export As → JPEG, choose quality ~85, strip EXIF, save.
- Repeat for each width you want — 1000 px, 600 px. That's three JPGs so far.
- Now do all three again as WebP. Six files.
- Hand-write the
<picture> element. Get srcset and sizes right. Add width, height, alt, loading="lazy", decoding="async".
- Write the alt text. (If you're doing this properly, also write a longer description and decide on a copyright notice.)
- Repeat for each social platform you post to — Instagram square (1080×1080), Pinterest pin (1000×1500), YouTube thumbnail (1280×720), each centre-cropped to the right aspect ratio.
- Upload everything to your site and reference each filename correctly.
Realistic time per image, with practice, is 10–15 minutes. For a 12-image blog post that's two to three hours. The reason most sites don't bother is purely that.
How this app helps
Same workflow, condensed:
- Drag photos in.
- Type alt text (optional — five seconds per image).
- Choose Images for my website, Optimize & Export, or another task and follow its final export step.
For each photo, the website-images task produces WebP + JPG variants at every size you asked for, plus the <picture> snippet ready to paste. Developer can add AVIF when running through localhost. Pro can add AVIF through the included localhost launcher or the protected online Pro version, using the login and password provided on the Start Here page inside the Pro ZIP download. AVIF is placed first while retaining WebP/JPG fallbacks. The social task produces the platform crops separately. Resized and JPG exports are re-encoded to remove EXIF metadata; see the Privacy note about the full-size WebP route. Quality settings provide simple presets with optional fine-tuning. A 12-image blog post can take minutes instead of hours.
What the app deliberately does not do: replace a proper editor. If you need to retouch, paint, do colour grading, fine-tune curves, or remove objects from a photo, you still want GIMP. This app is for the optimisation step after you've decided what photos go on the site.
SEO benefits in detail
Page speed → ranking
Google's Core Web Vitals are now a confirmed ranking factor. The three metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — should be ≤ 2.5 s. Almost always determined by the biggest image on the page.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — responsiveness to clicks/taps. Not image-related directly.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — should be < 0.1. Images without explicit
width and height cause layout shift. The generated snippet always includes these.
Image search visibility
Google Images is the world's second-largest search engine after regular Google. To get into it you need:
- Alt text that describes what's in the image.
- Filenames that read like English, not
IMG_4521.JPG. The app's Rename feature is for this.
- Structured data via JSON-LD — see the More metadata fields in the lightbox. Filling in title, description, author, copyright tells Google's image search exactly what it's looking at.
- Page context — Google reads the heading and text around the image. The gallery builder can add a page title, subheading and introductory text; for images placed on another site page, you provide that surrounding content.
Modern formats
WebP is roughly 25–35% smaller than JPG at the same visual quality. Modern browsers support it. The <picture> element lets you serve a smaller modern file and retain JPG as a compatible fallback — automatically, with no JavaScript needed:
<picture>
<source type="image/avif" srcset="my-photo-600.avif 600w, ...">
<source type="image/webp" srcset="my-photo-600.webp 600w, ...">
<img src="my-photo-1000.jpg" srcset="..." alt="…" loading="lazy">
</picture>
Developer and Pro AVIF: Developer uses AVIF through localhost. Pro buyers can use the included start-pro-localhost.cmd Windows launcher or sign in to the protected online Pro version; the online login and password are provided on the Start Here page inside the Pro ZIP download. Both routes use the reviewed WASM encoder rather than unreliable native Canvas AVIF encoding. AVIF is an optional choice in Optimize & Export, Quick export, Images for my website, Resize & Optimize Images, the advanced responsive exporters and montage export. Choose AVIF only when that is all you need, AVIF + WebP + JPG for the strongest browser compatibility, or keep WebP + JPG to produce no AVIF files. The codec runs in your browser, is loaded only when needed, and is not included in the Free or Personal packages. AVIF is unavailable when the downloaded App is opened directly with file://; WebP/JPG continue to work there.
Responsive images explained
A 1400-pixel-wide image looks great on a desktop monitor, but is six times too big on a phone in portrait orientation. The phone downloads all those pixels anyway and throws away the ones it doesn't use. That's wasted bandwidth on the device with the worst connection.
The srcset + sizes attributes let the browser pick the best available file for the actual display and screen density. A phone may choose a 400 or 800 px variant, while a wide/high-density desktop can choose 1200, 1600 or 2000 px. You publish one HTML snippet; the browser selects from the responsive set.
Social media images
Every platform has its own dimensions, and every platform re-compresses what you upload — often badly. Two practical implications:
- Match the platform's expected size before you upload. If you upload a 4000-pixel-wide image to Instagram, it gets compressed twice (your encoder + Instagram's). Upload at exactly the intended size (1080×1080 for square, 1080×1350 for portrait, 1080×1920 for story) and quality holds up better.
- Aspect ratio matters more than absolute size. An Instagram square that's actually 4:5 gets cropped, often badly. The app's social presets centre-crop to the exact platform dimensions so you control where the crop happens.
Every platform offers the four standard shapes people actually post — Square 1080×1080 · Portrait 1080×1350 · Landscape 1620×1080 · Wide landscape 1920×1080 — plus that platform's recommended sizes:
- Instagram — Story / Reel 1080×1920 · Feed landscape 1080×566
- Facebook — Shared post 1200×630 · Cover 851×315 · Story 1080×1920
- Twitter / X — Header 1500×500 (its posts are simply the standard shapes above)
- LinkedIn — Shared post 1200×627 · Banner 1584×396
- Pinterest — Standard Pin 1000×1500 · Long Pin 1000×2100
- YouTube — Thumbnail 1280×720 · Channel banner 2560×1440
- TikTok — Full-screen 1080×1920
Alt text — short, specific, no padding
The single best thing you can do for image accessibility and SEO at once. Three rules:
- Describe what the image is, not "image of". Bad: "Image of a dog". Good: "Tan terrier sitting in a flower bed".
- Don't keyword-stuff. Search engines penalise it and screen readers literally read every word out loud.
- Decorative images get empty alt. The snippet's
alt="" is intentional for purely decorative photos. If the image carries no information your text doesn't already convey, leave the alt field blank.
Free tools worth knowing
- GIMP — the classic free editor. Linux, Mac, Windows. Powerful, fairly steep learning curve.
- Photopea — browser-based GIMP/Photoshop alike. Works on a Chromebook or any machine without installing anything. Free with a small ad.
- Krita — free, focused on digital painting and illustration rather than photo editing.
- Squoosh — Google's single-image optimiser. Excellent for fine-grained quality control on one photo at a time. This app is roughly the bulk-batch equivalent.
- Browser DevTools → Lighthouse — built into Chrome and Edge. Runs a full performance audit on any page and tells you exactly which images are slowing you down.
One concrete checklist
Before publishing any page with images:
- Total image weight under 1 MB if at all possible. Use this app's Estimate export size to verify.
- Every meaningful image has alt text.
- Every image has explicit
width and height on the <img> (the snippet always does this).
- Hero images use
loading="lazy" only if they're below the fold; if they're the LCP element, drop the lazy.
- Filenames are human-readable.
- Social images are pre-cropped to platform dimensions, not uploaded raw.
The app handles resizing, encoding and explicit output dimensions, and it gives you size estimates and alt-text fields. You still choose suitable quality, write meaningful alt text and filenames, and decide whether a particular hero image should load eagerly rather than lazily.