14 Most Common Photo Editing Tasks Made Easy With These Online Tools

Although comprehensive photo editing tools like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP are able to handle all image editing tasks, you don’t have to buy and learn such complex tools to make common photo edits.

There are many online tools that you can use to perform common photo editing tasks without having to download any software. I personally use multiple tools to make photo edits like blending two images or making images transparent. I occasionally have to make such edits, so online tools do a fine job of accomplishing the task and I don’t have to install other software.

If you don’t need to make photo edits frequently, then I know just the right online photo editing tools that will handle your common photo editing needs. Below I have listed some of the common photo editing tasks along with the best online tool to handle the job.

Remove Background

If you have an image with a simple background that you would like to remove, then an online tool can help. However, the performance of these tools varies from each other depending on image type, which is why I am going to share two tools for this purpose.

Remove.bg and Slazzer are the two tools I use for removing the background and both of them automatically identify the background and remove it; you just need to upload the image.

I will recommend you to process your image through both of these tools as depending on your image any of these tools can offer better quality.

Compress images

If you are looking to reduce the size of images, then Toolur offers a great online image compression tool that is free and powerful. It allows you to compress up to 25 images at a time with a max size of 30MB each. Apart from selecting image compression percentage, it also lets you select compression type and method; including both lossy and lossless compression.

Alternatively, you can also try TinyPNG to compress PNG and JPEG files.

Blur photos online

Honestly, there aren’t many tools for this purpose that won’t require you to signup for a full suite of image editing tools. Although IMGonline has a basic blurring tool that can blur a whole image with varying intensity. You just need to upload your photo and select blur intensity from 1-300 and click on OK to get your blurred image. It also lets you compress the blurred image if you want.

Flip photo

There can be many photos that may become compositionally more pleasing when completely flipped vertically or horizontally. FlipAPicture is a great tool for this that lets you flip images both vertically and horizontally. You can upload a single image at a time and the only configuration option it has is to select the flip direction.

The processed image will open in full resolution and you can download it using the browser’s built-in Save image option.

Convert photos online

Online Apps and services have different requirements for image format, so there is a great need for image conversion software. For this purpose, I personally like Aconvert as it’s a completely free service without any limitations (although ad-supported). The service supports over 80 image formats and lets you convert images in bulk.

You can upload files from the PC or online image storage, and there is an option to resize the image before conversion as well if you want to resize.

Combine photos

For over 5 years I have used Photo Joiner for this purpose and it hasn’t disappointed me yet, so I’ll recommend you this tool. Using this tool you can merge 2-8 images together either vertically or horizontally. I personally like it for its resize option that lets me select the final image size so all the images size is automatically adjusted.

Like most other tools here, it is also free to use without any limitations.

Resize image

Another common image editing task as most apps and services have fixed image size requirements to upload. To quickly resize an image online Simple Image Resizer is a great tool. Once you upload your photo, the tool lets you resize the image based on a percentage or providing exact dimensions.

Overlay Images online

If you want to overlay an image over another image, then the LunaPic Blend two images feature is perfect for it. I personally use it for many of my article photos as I find it really simple to use. Just upload both background and overlay photos and you can freely resize and move the overlay photo to apply it.

I also really like their option to make the overlay photo transparent as it really makes the photos seem blended together.

If you have an image containing lots of text that you would like to copy, then an online OCR tool can help. An OCR tool can scan an image and extract all the text inside it into an editable document file. I’ll recommend OnlineOCR for this that lets you extract text in up to 46 languages from any image.

You can extract text from 15 images in an hour and the output document will be in Word, Excel, or Text format.

Sharpen images online

Due to camera and movement, it’s quite often we end up snapping a bit blurred photos. Thankfully, you can easily sharpen images online to remove blur or distortion effects. PINETOOLS sharpen feature does a great of sharpening images easily using a slider. Just upload your photos and use the slider to set sharpen intensity to get a clear image.

You can keep repeating the process until you get a perfectly clear image. There is also an option to increase the convolution mask size for a stronger effect.

View photo metadata

The camera saves lots of data about a photo when the photo is taken, including camera type and settings, location, time, image specification, and much more. If you want to view this data of any image, then an online tool is enough. Metapicz lets you view the metadata of any image you upload.

You can upload the image from the PC or a URL and the metadata will be shown at the bottom organized under categories.

Remove Metadata

As you must have noticed from the above description, the metadata contains sensitive information like location or date/time that could be bad if it ends up in the wrong hands. If you want to give your pictures to someone or upload it online, then removing metadata is important for privacy.

ExifRemove can remove all the metadata of any image of size 10MB or below. It can only accept one image at a time but works really fast compared to other tools I have tested.

Remove Red-eyes

It isn’t uncommon to have red eyes in photos; especially when the camera flash is on. However, you don’t have to discard a good photo because of it. With the help of FixRedEyes, you can easily remove ready eyes from your photos. Unlike other similar tools, this tool lets you point to the approx location of the eyes which greatly increases the chances of better removal.

You just need to upload the image and use a fixed box to select the areas where the red eye is present, then the rest is handled by the tool.

Add Watermark

If you want to protect your images from theft, then adding a watermark is really important. You can use Watermarkly for this that lets you watermark up to 50 photos at a time.

Unfortunately, their free version adds another tiny watermark to your image; you’ll have to upgrade to the pro version to remove the watermark and get some extra features too. Besides this limitation, the tool is really powerful for creating and using custom watermarks.

If you want a free tool without any watermarks and limitations, then uMark Online is also worth checking out. However, it only offers text watermarks.

Ending thoughts

For the above tasks, I have picked the best tools that can complete the task for free preferably. I am sure you must have noticed that many of these tools are quite bare-bone compared to similar desktop software. It’s only because such tools are usually used by people who occasionally need them and just want to quickly get the job done, so simpler tools are better for them. If you want to do some quick photo edits, these tools will be more than enough.

If you are a blogger or social media specialist, you can explore online tools to create an image.