Most photo edits people actually need are small: put your name on a picture before posting it, hide a face or a number plate, add a caption, grab the exact colour of a logo, or make sure a photo does not carry your home’s location. The tools on this page each do one of those jobs, and all of them run inside your browser, so the picture never leaves your device.
Which tool for which job
| You want to | Tool |
|---|---|
| Put your name or logo on a photo, in a corner or tiled across it | Add Watermark to Image |
| Hide a face, a number plate or a screen in a photo | Pixelate Image |
| Add classic top and bottom text | Meme Maker |
| Get the HEX or RGB code of one spot, or a whole palette | Color Picker From Image |
| See what a photo says about itself: camera, date, GPS | View Image Metadata |
| Strip that information before you share it | Remove EXIF Data |
| Turn a picture or a word into text art for Discord or a README | ASCII Art Generator |
Does editing a photo several times ruin it?
Every JPEG edit ends with a save, and every save compresses the picture again. The common advice is that each one costs a little more quality. We measured what that looks like with the settings these tools use: Chrome’s own JPEG encoder at quality 0.92, on a 2048×1536 landscape photo, saved five times in a row. The score is PSNR against the original, in decibels; higher is closer, and around 40 dB is hard to tell apart by eye.
| Save | Same size each time | Cropped 3 px each time |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 39.3 dB | 38.9 dB |
| 2nd | 39.1 dB | 36.4 dB |
| 3rd | 38.9 dB | 34.8 dB |
| 5th | 38.7 dB | 32.8 dB |
Two very different curves. When the picture keeps its size, almost all of the loss happens on the first save; the next four together cost 0.6 dB, because JPEG settles on the same result it already produced. When every step also crops a few pixels, each save costs about ten times as much, and five rounds lose 6 dB. The reason is that JPEG works in 8×8 pixel blocks: crop by anything other than a multiple of 8 and every block now straddles two old ones, so the encoder has to approximate everything again.
Watermarking, pixelating and adding meme text keep the picture’s size, so chaining them is cheap. Cropping and resizing move the grid. Switching to PNG avoids the loss entirely, but the same photo came out 5.5 times larger (7.0 MB instead of 1.3 MB), which is rarely worth it for a handful of edits.
A sensible order
- Crop and resize once, first, with the resize and crop tools. Decide the final shape before anything else, so the grid moves only once.
- Then the edits that keep the size: pixelate, watermark, caption. After each one, the “next step” links offer the next edit and pass the result along without a download.
- Compress last, if a form or a site has a size limit, with the image compression tools.
Pixelate properly, or not at all
A pixelation box only hides what it covers, and small blocks can leave enough shape behind for a face or a short number to be recognised or guessed. For a face at normal photo resolution, blocks of about 12–24 px are a reasonable starting point; for text, a solid box is safer than any blur. Pixelate before you add a watermark, so the mark stays crisp.
What a photo says about you
Phone photos usually carry EXIF metadata: the camera model, the exact time, and often the GPS position where it was taken. Our test photo carried GPS coordinates going in; after a single save through the canvas path the watermark, pixelate, meme and EXIF tools share, none were left, because a freshly written image file never contains the old metadata block. Checking a file with View Image Metadata takes a few seconds and tells you what is really there. For which apps and platforms strip location and which quietly keep it, see what actually removes photo location.
Nothing is uploaded
Every tool here works on your own device. There is no account, no watermark of ours and no file size limit beyond what your device can handle.
How this was measured. On 30 September 2026, in Chrome 154, with the same canvas and JPEG 0.92 path these tools use. Test photo: “2014 Track on Fremington Edge” by Kreuzschnabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, scaled to 2048×1536.
