Images · guides

Image resizer, background remover and AI images

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 9 September 2026 · 6 min read

This is the entrance to the images tower. An image resizer, something to strip a background, a converter between formats nobody chose, and — occupying more of this building every month — tools that make pictures rather than change them.

Two very different kinds of work share this tower, and it is worth knowing which one you are here for. The first is repair: a file is the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong format, or too heavy to upload. Those jobs are small, they have exact answers, and most of them can be done without sending the picture anywhere.

The second is creation, and it is a genuinely new field with unsettled rules. What you may do with a generated image, whose work it was trained on, what a client is entitled to know — none of that is decided, and floors that touch it say so rather than pretending the question is closed.

The repair wings are governed by one recurring point. Free image sites are among the most aggressive collectors of uploaded content on the internet, and a photograph carries more than it appears to: a location, a device, a date, sometimes a face that belongs to somebody who did not agree to any of this. Each floor says what the tool keeps, quoted from its own terms with the date.

And one practical theme runs through the whole building: the machine in front of you is more capable than it looks. Resizing, cropping, converting and basic retouching are built into every operating system, cost nothing, and never upload anything. Where that is true, the floor says so before it names a single service.

Three levels, and you are on the first. This atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one job completely and holds the shorter guides underneath it. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

Not covered here. It will not send you to an upload site when your own machine can do the job. For most of the repair floors there is a free, offline route, and where one exists it comes first.

It will not treat generated images as a settled subject. Ownership, training data and disclosure are all genuinely open questions, courts are still deciding several of them, and floors that touch those questions say what is undecided instead of guessing.

It will not help anybody make a picture of a real person doing something they did not do. Face swapping will be covered here one day because the category is enormous and people deserve an accurate explanation, and that page is explicit about where use becomes harm.

And it will not carry affiliate links, including on the generation floors, where the subscriptions are recurring and the commissions are correspondingly attractive.

A note on how the floors in this tower are sourced. What a service does with an uploaded photograph is quoted from that service’s own terms with the date we read them, never summarised from somebody else’s comparison. What an editing feature can do is described from having used it rather than from a feature list. And where a claim about quality would need a proper test to support — which of two upscalers recovers more detail, for instance — the floor waits for that test rather than guessing, because guessing is what almost every guide on these questions has done. What holds instead is simple: the offline route comes first wherever one exists, and no floor here carries an affiliate link.