A free alternative for resizing an image without uploading it

Resizing an image —setting it to a specific width and height— is one of the most common things people ask a website to do: to upload it to a store, attach it to an email, fit a social media size or lighten a gallery. And yet, for something so everyday, most services upload your photo to their server, and several charge for it or limit it.

This guide reviews, with concrete facts and as of today, how the best-known resizers limit things, and presents an alternative that is free, unlimited and uploads nothing: resize your images inside your own browser.

What they upload, charge for or limit

As of this guide:

• They upload your image to their server. iLoveIMG, ResizePixel, Simple Image Resizer, Img2go, Photoroom, Adobe Express and Canva do the resizing in the cloud: you upload the photo, they process it, and you download it again. Declared retention varies —ResizePixel says it deletes it in about an hour, Simple Image Resizer after 24 hours— but in all of them your image goes through a third party.
• They cap it by count or batch. iLoveIMG limits free resizing (on the order of a few dozen tasks per month) and reserves the rest for its paid plan; Simple Image Resizer only allows 3 images per batch on the free tier; BeFunky and others push batch processing to the paid plan.
• They ask for an account. Adobe Express and Canva require sign-up to export, and your design lives in their cloud. Photoroom works with an account and, on its free plan, watermarks downloads and limits them to low resolution.
• Sometimes it is not even free. TinyPNG, well known for compression, does not offer resizing on its free website: its resize feature only exists in its paid API (free up to 500 operations per month, charged after that).

To be fair: Squoosh, Google's open-source project, also resizes inside the browser without uploading anything. It is a great private option. What it lacks is doing it in batches, with presets and a dedicated tool: in Squoosh, resizing is a checkbox inside its compressor and you work one image at a time.

The alternative: resize in the browser, free and without uploading

Colibrí's Resize image does exactly that, with no server in between: your photos are never uploaded and everything happens on your device. It is free, with no sign-up and no limit on the number of images or size, and it adds no watermark.

You can set the size in two ways: by typing the exact width and height in pixels —with the aspect ratio locked so the image is not distorted— or by scale percentage. It includes common presets (Full HD 1920×1080, 4K, Instagram square 1080×1080 and portrait, story 1080×1920, thumbnail…) and a do-not-enlarge option so you do not lose sharpness. It resizes many images at once with the same settings and downloads them individually or as a ZIP, with PNG, JPEG or WebP output and quality control. On top of that, re-encoding strips the EXIF metadata (including GPS location).

To keep the result sharp, resizing uses high-quality resampling that scales down in steps (halving) rather than in a single jump, which avoids the jaggies you get from shrinking a lot at once.

Resizing, cropping and compressing are not the same

It is worth telling them apart, because they are often confused:

• Resizing changes the size of the whole image without removing anything (from 4000×3000 to 1920×1440, for example).
• Cropping keeps a piece and discards the rest: it changes the framing and the aspect ratio.
• Compressing aims to reduce the file weight (the KB) with professional codecs, touching the dimensions as little as possible.

You will often want to combine them: crop to frame, resize to the target size and compress so it is light. All three work the same way in Colibrí: in your browser, nothing uploaded.

Step by step

1. Open Resize image and drag your photos (or click to pick them). They open in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
2. Choose Dimensions (width and height in pixels, or a preset) or Percentage.
3. Leave Keep aspect ratio on so it is not distorted; if you enter only one value, the other is computed automatically.
4. Choose the output format (PNG, JPEG or WebP) and the quality.
5. Press Resize and download each image or all of them together in a ZIP.