Are you looking for an easy way to crop and resize images for social media? On social media, it’s important to use beautiful, high-quality photos that are cropped to the right size for each channel. Even if you don’t have access to image editing software like Photoshop, don’t worry. There are dozens of free tools to resize your images online.
As a marketing designer, I want to share the best online tools that can save you time and effort! These tools are easier and more accurate than trying to resize each image within each social media platform at the time you want to share your content.
By using these useful little website tools, you can easily crop and resize images at the best sizes for social media posts, as well as for social media banners and profile images (i.e. your channel branding). The tools at the top of this list even have pre-set sizes to export your images for common social media platforms. Following that are three great tools that let you resize a set or batch of images at the same time – which allows you to create content ahead of time to be posted later.
In this article, we’ll look at 7 of the best tools to help you easily resize your images for free online. I’ve also summarized what each tool is best for, and who made it. I omitted tools if their creator was not disclosed (that’s a red flag!). All of these tools have been created as free resources by web developers, and each one can help you easily resize your photos for your social media in a few simple steps, with no need to install or sign up for anything.
Here are the top 7 tools to resize images for social media:
Best for: resizing an image for a social post or banner, or a content thumbnail
Social Image Resizer Tool is a free online image editing tool offered by Internet Marketing Ninjas; a resources-based website that concentrates on digital marketing techniques and tools.
It couldn’t be easier, Social Image Resizer Tool lets you choose which social image size you want from a drop down menu. This tool is also great for making thumbnail sized images. There are size options available to select for YouTube and Pinterest thumbnail images, as well as small assets like a ‘favicon’ that you need if you are working on branding for a website.
To resize for social: simply upload your image file, and then select the social media placement option from the ‘Choose a Size’ drop down menu (for example, ‘Instagram Image Feed’ or ‘Facebook Cover Photo’). Once you have selected your export size, you can click and drag to adjust the crop marks – while the height and width stay at the perfect ratio for your chosen social placement.
Best for: resizing an image for a social post or banner (with basic editing)
The PhotoResizer website is a free online image editing tool offered by Zygomatic; an online publisher and game development company founded in 2003.
On PhotoResizer.com you can resize and crop your images, either larger or smaller than your original image. You can crop to pre-defined sizes for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and YouTube.
In addition to resizing tools, there are also some basic editing functions: add text, add a greyscale or blur filter, rotate the image, flip the image, draw basic shapes, and free draw.
To resize for social: simply upload your image file, and then select a social media platform from the ‘Crop’ drop down menu. This will open a window that shows you where each placement option will be displayed on that social platform, as seen in the screen capture image above.
Best for: resizing many images fast with intelligent crop suggestions
The BIRME website is a free online image editing tool that was built by a website developer named Shang Liang.
The BIRME image resizing tool helps you to edit images faster by allowing you to resize multiple images at the same time. For example, you may have a folder full of photos that you want to crop to a square shape for Instagram – BIRME lets you set the export size, and then lets you preview and adjust the visible crop area for each individual image (i.e. BIRME calls this the ‘image focal point’).
Built in 2012, this tool was totally redesigned in 2016 to make sure that all this powerful browser tool would work for everyone at every skill level. It works fast because your computer does the image processing using Javascript, instead of the way some other online tools work – by uploading your images to a server in a different location for processing.
One great feature of BIRME is that you can preview the photos before you’re done, so you know how your edits will look before you export them. Super impressed by the ‘Auto detect image focal point’ option, which analyzes the color and contrast of your images and intelligently suggests crop lines that focus on the main object in the photo.
Best for: resizing many images, standardizing both landscape and portrait images
The Bulk Resize Photos website is a free online image editing tool offered by Wruff Pty Ltd; an Australian company that published the tool in 2014.
Similarly to the BIRME tool above, Bulk Resize Photos works fast because your computer does the image processing, instead of the way some other online tools work – by uploading your images to a server in a different location for processing.
Unique features of the Bulk Resize Photos tool are the ability to add a background color to fill any gaps, and also the ‘Longest Side’ option that lets you set your desired length of the final resized images – whether that longest edge is the vertical or horizontal edge.
The two frustrating aspects of this tool are that you cannot preview the images before exporting, and after processing your images you can only save them as combined into a zip file. However, if you know want to resize both landscape and portrait shaped images at the same time, this should be the best tool for you.
5. I Love IMG
Free online image resizing tool: I Love IMG
Best for: resizing many images, with an option to skip small images within a set
The I Love IMG website is a free online image editing tool offered by Your Image Editor; a web development company that sells components such as themed WordPress template designs.
Another tool to resize multiple images, simply upload all of your images at once, then choose whether you want to resize by pixels or percentage. I Love IMG is especially good for resizing images to be larger than the originals. You can also prevent individual smaller images within a set from becoming blurry as they are resized, by selecting the unique checkbox option that reads ‘Do Not Enlarge if Smaller’. Using this option will limit any small sized images in set from being enlarged, so you can keep these images at a smaller size where they look clear and high quality.
One potentially frustrating aspect of this tool is that the resizing functions and the cropping functions are completely separated, so this tool would require a second upload of all your images if you want to resize them and also crop them to a different shape.
Best for: basic image editing and creative filters
The PicResize website is a free online image editing tool offered since 2005 by InterNich; an online publishing company.
InterNich boasts that PicResize is “the original picture editing tool on the Internet.” The service has always remained free to use and has processed more than 150 million pictures since 2005.
PicResize.com is free to use because it makes money from hosting third party advertising. One useability issue is the advertisement pop-ups, which are safe but annoying in terms of their placement. However, PicResize does offer many filter options (such as an ‘Oil Paint’ effect) so it’s still worth including in this list.
Along with the filter effects, basic image editing tools included are to flip and/or to rotate your image while you resize it.
Best for: advanced image editing and creative filters
The BeFunky Photo Editor website is a free online image editing tool offered by BeFunky Inc.; a company based in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in creating image editing tools that are free and easy to use.
BeFunky Photo Editor does have a silly name, but it’s a robust image editing tool with many features. Seriously, there are so many features that they can’t all be listed here – go and check it out for yourself!
Beyond cropping and resizing, BeFunky has an incredible range of editing tools (and new tools are added frequently). Some of these tools that are useful for editing social media images are: Auto-Enhance, Vibrance, Color Replace, and Vignette. You can even filter your image to look like an artwork, or make a custom layered image by overlaying text, shapes, and textures.
BeFunky even has a ‘Stock Image Library’, where you can search through stock photos that are free to use for your content, and are sourced from Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash. Simply search for a keyword and then browse through stock images related to that keyword.
BeFunky is the best online image editing tool if you want to have a lot of options to play with, all in an easy to use interface. A simple side editing panel sits next to the image preview panel, so you can view your work in progress as you edit.
