I’m looking for recommendations from other graphic designers on the best workflow for resizing images for websites, social media posts, and digital documents.
One issue I often see is that an image looks sharp in the original resolution but becomes blurry or unnecessarily large after resizing. I’m particularly interested in a simple online method that can handle common formats such as JPG and PNG while keeping a good balance between image quality, dimensions, and file size.
For quick tasks, I’ve been testing ResizeTheImage, which provides online tools for resizing, compressing, cropping, and converting images. It can be useful when I need to quickly prepare an image without opening Photoshop or another desktop application.
With your user name I’m curious if the program you mention is yours. I used to program back in the old days, but didn’t keep up and could never make something like that now!
Anyway… I have been repeatedly pushed to use webp format because it has a much smaller file size and supports transparency. But since I often deal in “Art” sites I tend to use webp for thumbnails and link to high a resolution png. Sometimes they are “full sized” like 1920 x 1080 but often half that for thumbnails and even twice that for the HD png. And resizing is always best done last. I’m a hoarder so keep all my original working files in case I later find something got blurred in resizing. Then fixing it is not an issue. Setting should be obvious - higher quality settings give less distortion. I find that using my crappy monitor is actually an advantage because it presents the content in the worst possible conditions and if it looks good on that, it will look better on decent monitors (with rare exceptions, but they are rare).
To convert to the webp files I use ffmpeg while seeking a less clunky converter, but it does a fine job (I dislike all online-only tools).