Image Stretcher

To make a picture wider, raise the width and leave the height alone; to make it taller, do the opposite. A 1200 × 800 photo stretched to 1800 × 800 is half as wide again and exactly as tall as before. Lowering one side squashes the picture in that direction instead: stretching and squashing are the same operation pointed different ways.

If you think in proportions rather than pixels, turn on Stretch by percentage and set each side separately. 150% width and 100% height stretches the image to one and a half times its width; 100% and 50% squashes it to half its height. In a batch, every image is stretched by the same percentages from its own size.

When a slot needs an exact shape (a slide background, a desktop or phone wallpaper, a website header, a video frame) and your picture is a different shape, there are three ways to make it fit. Crop to fill cuts off whatever sticks out. Fit inside keeps everything and adds bars. Stretch keeps everything and fills the frame completely, at the cost of distortion.

Tap a shape above the size fields to stretch straight to it: 1920 × 1080 for a 16:9 screen, 1080 × 1920 for a phone, 1080 × 1080 for a square, 1440 × 1080 for 4:3, 2560 × 1080 for an ultrawide monitor or 1500 × 500 for a banner. Stretching works best on pictures without obvious geometry, such as skies, water, foliage, gradients, textures, patterns and flat graphics. When the content would look wrong stretched, switch to Crop to fill, or crop to 16:9 or 9:16 yourself. For a Full HD frame with cropping as the default, use Resize Image to 1920×1080; for a phone-shaped one, the Instagram Story resizer.

It depends far more on the picture than on the numbers. A change in proportions of 5–10% is hard to spot in most photos. Between about 10% and 25% it shows on anything people know the true shape of: faces, eyes, wheels, circles, lettering and logos. Beyond 30% the stretch is obvious, which is the whole point of a stretched-face meme and a problem everywhere else.

Landscapes, cloudscapes, sea and abstract backgrounds hide distortion well, because nothing in them has a fixed shape. Before you download, compare the preview with the original and look at the roundest thing in the frame. If it has turned into an oval you don't like, stretch less, or crop part of the way and stretch the rest.

Making a side bigger spreads the existing pixels over more space. The browser interpolates new pixels in between, so a strongly stretched image turns softer along the stretched direction: double the width and vertical edges blur a little, while horizontal ones stay crisp. Squashing a side is the safer direction, since pixels are combined rather than invented.

This is a plain stretch: every part of the picture is scaled by the same amount. Photo editors also offer content-aware scaling, such as Photoshop's Content-Aware Scale, which stretches empty areas like sky while trying to protect people and objects. It suits subtle changes but can still warp detail, and it needs that software. Here, images can be stretched up to 16,384 pixels on a side.

Stretching works in reverse too. If a picture was stretched by an app or a screen setting, restore its proportions by setting the stretched side back to the original ratio: the correct width is the height multiplied by the original width-to-height ratio. A 4:3 photo that ended up as 1920 × 1080 goes back to 1440 × 1080 (1080 × 4 ÷ 3), and a 16:9 picture squashed into 1080 × 1080 goes back to 1920 × 1080.

Games add a twist. Players who run a 4:3 "stretched resolution" such as 1440 × 1080 on a 16:9 monitor see the game pulled wide, but a screenshot is often saved at the 4:3 size the game rendered, so it looks narrower than what was on screen. Stretch it to 1920 × 1080 to get back the picture you actually saw.

Open JPG/JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC/HEIF images. By default each file keeps its format, so a stretched PNG stays a PNG with its transparency, while HEIC photos are saved as JPG because browsers cannot write HEIC. You can also choose JPG, PNG or WebP, with a quality setting for JPG and WebP. Stretching adds pixels, so an enlarged file is usually heavier: compress the image afterwards if it has to stay under a size limit.

Add several images to stretch them all with the same settings, then download them one by one or together as a ZIP. Everything happens on your device: the images are never uploaded, and there is no account, no watermark and no daily limit.