What a good image pipeline does
Three things, in this order. Resize the image to the dimensions it'll actually be displayed at. Compress with a quality setting that balances size against perceived sharpness. Strip metadata so the file doesn't leak your camera serial number, the GPS coordinates of your kitchen, or the timestamp of your weekend.
Done in that order, a 12-megapixel raw JPEG that started life at 6 MB lands somewhere between 80 KB and 250 KB depending on its content — small enough for any platform's upload limit and any blog's Lighthouse score.
Step 1 — Resize to the target dimensions
Compressing without resizing first is the most common mistake. A 4032×3024 photograph that'll be rendered at 800×600 wastes bytes on detail no one ever sees. Resize first, compress second.
Common targets: 1200 px on the long edge for blog hero images; 1080 px for Instagram; 1920 px for desktop wallpaper; 600 px for newsletter inline images. The Resize tool keeps aspect ratio by default and uses a Lanczos resampler, which is the same algorithm Photoshop uses for high-quality downscales.
Step 2 — Compress at the right quality
Quality 80–85 is the sweet spot for photographic content — it's the point at which JPEG artifacts become invisible to the human eye for most images. Below 70 you'll see banding in skies and softening on edges; above 90 you're paying for bytes most viewers can't see.
For images with hard edges (screenshots, diagrams, logos), the math changes — quality 90+ matters more, but those images also compress dramatically smaller because there's less noise to encode. PNG is often the better format for them.
Step 3 — Strip EXIF
Every photo your phone takes embeds: GPS coordinates (down to a few metres), the make and model of the camera, the date and time, the exposure settings, sometimes a thumbnail of the original image that survives later edits. None of that survives a normal Instagram post — they strip it — but it does survive a direct upload to your blog or a screenshot shared in Slack.
The Strip EXIF tool removes everything except the orientation tag (which you usually want to keep so the image displays right-side-up). The file is identical visually; the metadata is just gone.
Optional Step 4 — Convert to WebP
WebP files are typically 25–35% smaller than JPEG at the same visual quality. Browser support has been universal since 2020 (every major browser, every modern mobile OS), so you can ship WebP as your only format with confidence.
The trade-off is editing software: WebP support in image editors lags JPEG. Keep the original JPEG/PNG for archive; ship the WebP for the web. The Convert tool does the format change in one pass and preserves the resize + compress settings from earlier steps.
Running it as a workflow
Open the Social Media Image Prep workflow to chain resize → compress → strip EXIF in three clicks. The file carries between steps automatically. For blog images specifically, the Web-Ready Images workflow swaps the EXIF step for WebP conversion.
Both workflows leave the original file untouched, run entirely in your browser, and persist nothing about your image. The whole thing finishes in well under a second on a modern laptop.
Tools used in this guide
Run it as a workflow
FAQ
- What's the difference between resize and crop?
- Resize keeps the whole image and scales it down (or up). Crop keeps a rectangular region and discards the rest. For blog headers you usually want crop, then resize. For social uploads, resize alone is fine.
- Should I use AVIF instead of WebP?
- AVIF compresses ~20% smaller than WebP but encoding is significantly slower (we run it in your browser). For batch jobs of one or two images, AVIF is a great choice. For batches of fifty, WebP saves enough time to be worth it.
- How do I know EXIF was actually stripped?
- Right-click the output file → Properties (Windows) or Get Info (macOS) → Details. The metadata fields should be empty. The Strip EXIF tool also shows you what it removed in the result card.
- Does this work for HEIC photos from my iPhone?
- Yes. The Convert tool reads HEIC natively in the browser. Convert to JPEG or WebP first, then run the rest of the pipeline.