Online Photo Editor

The Online Photo Editor is a lightweight image editor for the most common quick fixes: rotate, flip and crop a picture, adjust brightness, contrast and saturation, apply one of ten preset filters, and download the result as a PNG. The name hints at Photoshop, but it is not that. There are no layers, brushes, text, selections, retouching tools or undo history. It is meant for fast, basic adjustments to a single photo.

How to use it

1. Click "Click to upload an image" and choose a picture. Whenever you load a new image, the earlier rotation, flips, brightness, contrast, saturation and filter are reset.
2. Use the toolbar buttons for geometry: "Rotate left" and "Rotate right" turn the picture 90 degrees each time, while "Flip horizontal" and "Flip vertical" mirror it.
3. Use the three sliders for colour: Brightness and Contrast (40% to 160%, default 100%) and Saturation (0% to 200%, default 100%).
4. Pick a preset under "Filter": Original, Grayscale, Sepia, Invert, Cool tone, Warm tone, Faded, Vivid, High-contrast B&W or Slight blur. A filter is combined with the three sliders rather than replacing them.
5. To crop, click "Crop", then press and drag on the preview to draw a rectangle. Click "Apply crop" to confirm, or "Cancel" to give up.
6. When you are satisfied, click "Download image" to get edited.png. The preview is scaled down to fit the page, but the downloaded file keeps the picture's original pixel dimensions.

A practical scenario

Say you photographed a document on your phone in portrait orientation and it uploads sideways. Click "Rotate right" to straighten it, raise the contrast a little so the writing stands out, apply the High-contrast B&W filter, and finally crop away the desk around the edges. Each step shows in the preview straight away. For a dim indoor photo you might raise brightness to around 120% and nudge saturation up slightly. Treat such numbers as starting points and judge by how your own picture looks in the preview.

Supported range and known limits

• That is the whole feature set: 90-degree rotation, horizontal and vertical flips, rectangular crop, three adjustment sliders and ten preset filters. There is no free-angle rotation, fixed-ratio crop, resizing, text, drawing, mosaic, background removal or beautify.
• There is no undo or redo. You can drag sliders back to default and reverse a rotation or flip, but once a crop is applied it cannot be undone; you would need to upload the original again.
• When you apply a crop, the current brightness, contrast, saturation and filter are drawn into the cropped image and the sliders and filter are reset to defaults (100% / Original), so adjustments are not applied twice. This also means the pre-crop adjustment values can no longer be dialled back separately.
• Crop selection uses pointer events, so both mouse dragging and finger dragging on a touch screen can draw the rectangle.
• Colour adjustments and filters depend on the browser's canvas filter support. In a browser without it, brightness, contrast, saturation and filters may have no effect, while rotating, flipping and cropping still work.
• Export is always PNG at the picture's pixel dimensions. A photo saved as PNG can be much bigger than the original JPEG. Use the Image Format Converter afterwards if you need a smaller file.
• EXIF and similar metadata are not kept. Everything is processed in memory, so extremely large pictures can make the browser slow.

FAQ: Why do the colours look different after cropping?

They should not. When you crop, the tool saves the current preview canvas, which already includes your colour adjustments and filter, as the new image and resets the sliders and filter to their defaults, so nothing is processed twice. If the colours still look off, simply adjust the sliders again after cropping.

FAQ: How do the filters work, and can I change their strength?

Each filter is a fixed set of browser canvas-filter settings. For example, Grayscale removes all colour, Sepia applies a 70% brown tone, and Slight blur is about 1.5 pixels of blur. The filters have no strength slider of their own; you choose them as they are. You can fine-tune the overall look with the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation sliders. Choose Original to use only the sliders.

FAQ: Why is my photo's orientation different from my phone?

Phones sometimes rely on an orientation tag in the EXIF data to decide how to show a photo. Current browsers usually honour that tag and work with the picture as displayed, but behaviour differs between browsers and older versions. If the picture looks wrong after uploading, just use Rotate left or Rotate right. The downloaded file has the orientation you see in the preview.

FAQ: How large a picture can it handle?

There is no limit written into the tool, but the whole picture is loaded into browser memory and drawn on a canvas, and both preview and download work at the original pixel size. Pictures in the tens of megapixels can be slow or fail on modest devices; shrink them first if that happens.

Privacy and how files are processed

All editing happens in your browser. The picture is read and drawn onto a canvas on the page, rotating, colour changes, filters and cropping are operations on that canvas, and the PNG is exported straight from it when you download. The picture is not uploaded to a server and no account is needed. Closing or refreshing the page discards the picture and all your changes.