Resizing a photo to 1080 × 1080 threw away between a quarter and nearly half of it in our tests. The upright cat photo lost 25%, the waterfall 33%, the Golden Gate Bridge 38% and the Everest panorama 46%, all from the edges, because a square frame can only hold the middle of a picture that isn’t square. The other two ways to hit an exact size don’t cut anything: one adds bars, the other stretches.
We ran five public photos and two screenshots through our Resize to exact size tool on 24 September 2026, in Chromium 153, at four common sizes and all three of its modes, with its default quality of 90. The pictures come out upright, centred and with no metadata; what changes between the modes is what happens to the part that doesn’t fit.
How much crop to fill cuts off
Crop to fill scales the picture until it covers the whole frame, then trims whatever sticks out on the long side. The share it trims depends only on how far apart the two shapes are, so the numbers below hold for any photo with the same proportions as ours.
| Picture | Shape | 1080 × 1080 | 1920 × 1080 | 1080 × 1350 | 1080 × 1920 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Golden Gate Bridge, 5388 × 3368 | 1.6:1 | 37.5% | 10.0% | 50.0% | 64.8% |
| Hopetoun Falls, 3072 × 2048 | 3:2 | 33.3% | 15.6% | 46.7% | 62.5% |
| Everest from the air, 2971 × 1615 | 1.84:1 | 45.6% | 3.4% | 56.5% | 69.4% |
| Cat, upright, 1795 × 2397 | 3:4 | 25.1% | 57.9% | 6.4% | 24.9% |
| Eiffel Tower, 2900 × 5367 | 1:1.85 | 46.0% | 69.6% | 32.5% | 3.9% |
| Laptop screenshot, 2880 × 1800 | 16:10 | 37.5% | 10.0% | 50.0% | 64.8% |
Two patterns matter. Turning a landscape photo into a story (1080 × 1920) removes 62 to 69% of it, and turning an upright phone photo into a 1920 × 1080 slide removes 58%: in both cases you keep a strip from the middle. And a laptop screenshot at 16:10 loses 10% going to 1920 × 1080, which on our 2880 × 1800 captures meant 90 pixels off the top and 90 off the bottom, enough to cut through the page’s navigation bar.
The tool always keeps the centre. A face near the edge of a group photo is the first thing to go, and it won’t warn you. When the part you care about is off-centre, use Crop image first and place the box yourself, then resize.
Bars keep everything, and make smaller files
Fit with bars scales the picture until the long side fits and fills the rest with a colour. Nothing is lost, and the bars take up the same share of the frame that crop to fill would have cut: 65% of a 1080 × 1920 story, for the bridge photo, is flat colour.
Flat colour costs almost nothing to store, so the files come out smaller. At 1080 × 1920 the bridge was 250 KB with bars against 595 KB cropped. The Eiffel Tower at 1920 × 1080 was 156 KB with bars and 284 KB cropped.
| Photo | 1080² crop | 1080² bars | 1080² stretch | 1920×1080 crop | 1920×1080 bars | 1920×1080 stretch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Golden Gate Bridge | 346 | 243 | 356 | 579 | 534 | 579 |
| Hopetoun Falls | 407 | 322 | 448 | 683 | 646 | 728 |
| Everest from the air | 387 | 232 | 386 | 654 | 647 | 654 |
| Cat, upright | 320 | 256 | 318 | 457 | 264 | 501 |
| Eiffel Tower | 216 | 143 | 248 | 284 | 156 | 433 |
We use bars for product shots, documents, slides and anything where an edge carries information. For photos of people and places we crop, because a small picture floating in a band of white reads as a mistake on most feeds.
Stretch is only safe within about 5%
Stretch makes the picture exactly the size you asked for by changing its proportions. Put the Eiffel Tower into 1920 × 1080 and everything in it becomes 3.29 times wider relative to its height. Even the waterfall, a 3:2 photo going to 16:9, was widened by 18.5%: a circle in it comes out 18.5% wider than it is tall.
Three of our 20 photo and size pairs came within 7%: Everest into 1920 × 1080 (3.4% narrower), the Eiffel Tower into 1080 × 1920 (4.1% wider) and the cat into 1080 × 1350 (6.8% wider). Our rule is to stretch only below 5% and crop above it; that line is our judgement, not a measurement. Stretch doesn’t save space either: across the 20 pairs it was never more than 1% smaller than cropping, and the Eiffel Tower at 1920 × 1080 came out 52% larger.
When resizing makes a PNG bigger
We expected a smaller picture to make a smaller file. For screenshots saved as PNG with every pixel kept, it often doesn’t. A 1440 × 900 screenshot of our tools page was 137 KB. Cropped and scaled to 1280 × 720, with 29% fewer pixels, it came out at 181 KB: 32% larger. The tool flags this under the file when it happens.
| Screenshot | Original | New size | PNG, every pixel | PNG, smaller file | WebP 90 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Our homepage, 2880 × 1800 | 441 | 1920 × 1080 | 409 | 109 (192 colours) | 128 |
| Our tools page, 2880 × 1800 | 312 | 1920 × 1080 | 282 | 70 (96 colours) | 104 |
| Our tools page, 1440 × 900 | 137 | 1280 × 720 | 181 | 46 (128 colours) | 60 |
The two high-resolution captures shrank to 40% of their pixels and only lost 7 to 10% of their size. Our explanation: a screenshot is mostly long runs of identical pixels, which PNG stores cheaply, and scaling blends every edge of every letter into new in-between colours that break those runs up. The fix is in the same table. Saving as PNG with Smaller file (up to 256 colours) cut all three by 66 to 78% against the originals, and WebP did nearly as well with no limit on colours. The PNG guide has more on why PNG behaves like this.
PNG work is also slower: the two large screenshots took 1.2 to 3 seconds per size on our test Mac, against 0.3 to 1.5 seconds for the photos.
For the sizes each network asks for, taken from their own help pages, see social media image sizes for 2026.