Guides & Articles
Practical, plain-English guides to getting more out of the tools — written by the people who build them.
JPG to PNG: Why the PNG Is 6x Bigger, and How to Fix It
Every converter writes the same truecolour PNG, so a 33 KB JPG comes back as 99 KB and a photo comes back six times its size. Here are the measured numbers, what the pages that rank do about it, and the indexed PNG that beat the JPG it came from.
Image ··8 min read
How to Extract Text From an Image Without Uploading It
OCR fails for four specific reasons, and only one of them is the engine. Here is what decides whether a photo reads, the EXIF tag that quietly ruins sideways photos, and the numbers from real files.
Image ··9 min read
How to Combine Images Into One Picture Without Uploading
Every image combiner works until your images are different sizes. Here is the exact rule that decides the output, the numbers from real files, and the arithmetic I got wrong.
Image ··8 min read
How to Change an Image to 300 DPI Without Re-encoding It
A JPEG can carry two different resolutions at once, and the one your print shop reads may not be the one the tool changed. Here are the bytes, measured.
Image ··7 min read