Image tools by task

Everyday conversions

Business images

Why these are scenes, not tool pages

A tool page exposes the controls: pick a format, pick a quality, pick a size. A scene page exposes the job. The difference matters when you are handling fifty files, because the choices a tool page asks you to make are the same choices you would otherwise re-derive for every batch, and the wrong one is invisible until the client complains.

Each scene below is a fixed recipe: the same crop logic, the same output format and the same target settings that the job itself implies. If you need a setting these scenes do not offer, the underlying tool page is linked from each scene, and the short version is always the same — convert first, crop second, compress last. Doing it in the other order throws away resolution twice and produces files that look soft at exactly the size the destination requires.

What each scene is actually doing

Format conversion, before anything else

HEIC is the format that starts most of these workflows, because an iPhone writes it by default and half the destinations in the world still refuse it. Converting a mixed folder in one pass is not a convenience: it is the step that stops a batch of two hundred files from failing one at a time later. The output is a ZIP rather than a stream of downloads, so the folder structure survives.

Compressing to a number, not a quality level

Portals think in kilobytes, not in quality percentages. A form that says "under 200 KB" does not care what your quality slider says; it cares what the file weighs. The scene page binary-searches the quality setting until the file lands under the target, which is the only reliable way to hit a ceiling without guessing repeatedly. Note the direction: this exists to satisfy an upper bound, and the lower bounds some portals also enforce are a separate problem, covered on the portal page.

Product photos and the white background

A marketplace listing photo is judged on the product being isolated and centred, not on artistic merit. Cutting the background out, placing the product on a uniform white square and keeping the product at a consistent proportion across a catalogue is what makes a shop grid look like a shop rather than a folder of snapshots. Batch handling is the point: a hundred SKUs edited one at a time will not stay consistent, and inconsistent framing is visible to a customer before any single photo's quality is.

Headshots and avatars

These two are separated because the framing rules pull in opposite directions. A headshot wants shoulders in frame and a face that occupies a natural share of the height; an avatar wants a face that survives being displayed at 40 pixels in a circular crop. Doing both from one file usually means the avatar ends up with the face too small, or the headshot ends up cropped at the collar.

Where the scene pages stop

None of these scenes invent specifications. If a destination publishes a pixel window, a byte ceiling or a head proportion, the figure lives on that destination's page with its source, not in a scene preset — a scene is a workflow, a specification is a citation. For the specifications themselves, start from the ID and passport photo sizes index, or from the guides, where the twenty-destination comparison and the portal upload ceilings are collected.

One practical warning that applies to every scene: keep the originals. Every operation here writes a new file, and the compressed or cropped output cannot be expanded back into a usable source. If a result is rejected downstream, the fix is almost always to re-run from the original rather than to reprocess the derivative.

Method

This page describes workflows, and its claims about them are about what the tools do rather than about what regulators require. Anything numeric that appears on a scene's own page is sourced there and dated; corrections go to hi@pixlready.com and are recorded on the change log.