How To Convert and Resize Images On Your iPhone fAL8HjET vY

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to resize, compress, and do other things with images on your iPhone. So previous to iOS 26, it was surprisingly difficult to export a photo from the photos app or take an image in the files app and resize it and compress it in a different format. You could do it using a shortcut that you created, or you could use a third party app. But in iOS 26, we now have the preview app on our iPhones as part of iOS, and you can use that app to do all of this and more. Let me show you how. So as my first example, I'm going to go into the photos app and let's say we want to take a photo like this and we need to send it to somebody or upload to a website. The only problem is this image is too high resolution. The website will reject it because it's too big and we don't want to send that big of an image to somebody over email, so we want to make this image smaller. So the way to do this in iOS 26 is to send this image from the photos app to the preview app. So the first step is to send this image from the photos app to the preview app and in the preview app, we can manipulate it in all sorts of ways and export it in a new format. So to do that, I'm going to tap the share button at the bottom, the typical way to get content from one app to another. Now with this selected, I want to look in the row of icons here for preview. If you don't see preview here, scroll over until you do. And if you still don't tap more and then here you can edit and then use the plus button to the left of the suggestions to add preview to the top of the list. I moved it all the way up here under airdrop. So that's why I see it right here as the second item. So all they need to do now is tap this and preview opens and this image goes into it and creates a new document. You could see that it's a new document by looking at the name up here. This is what the document's called. It's using the same name as the file name from photos, but we haven't done anything to the image yet. It's the same image. It's just now a file instead of in the photos app. Now for this first example, let's just do two simple things. Let's resize it and then export it in a different format. And then in the next example, I'll show you how to do even more. So to resize it, go to the three dots button here at the top, tap that. This takes you to the adjust size screen, but there's a lot you can do, but chances are you probably just want to change the width and height. You can set the units here. I'm going to leave it at pixels, but you could change it to percent or inches, which would then use the resolution setting here. But most likely you're doing this because maybe some website told you it's got to be a thousand pixels or less on one side. So I could just change this number here to say 1000 and you could see the height adjust automatically because of this switch for scale proportionally. If you turn that off, then the horizontal and vertical dimensions would scale differently and it would stretch the image. Now we tap the check box here and now it's only 1000 pixels wide. We successfully resize the image. So now that we have it as the right size, let's export it. To do that, tap on the file name here and you get some options having to do with the file. It's kind of like the file menu on macOS. Here we can move it, rename it, all of that, and most importantly, for our purposes, export it. And the export image screen lets you pick the format. So it's still at HEIC, which is a great format to use on your iPhone to get smaller pictures and fit more of them on your iPhone, but for more compatibility, say uploading to a website, sending it to somebody and you don't know what they've got, you might want to just use the good old JPEG format here. Now notice the size. We can adjust this and this is going to compress the image more. This will only be available if the format you've chosen allows compression. HEIC does and JPEG does. So we might want to get to say under 100K like that because maybe that's the restriction for the website we're uploading to or something. So we pick a size that's there. Then we use the check there at the top. Now it's going to ask us where to save it. And this is a regular save dialog here. It's referring to the files app. So let's go up here to the documents folder and let's say, let's go into the images folder here and there's a bunch of images in there already. Let's change the name. We'll do that here at the bottom. It says save as, we can tap that and now we can name it something else. So we'll just name it this and then we'll tap save. And now we've exported the image as a JPEG with pretty high compression. So it's under 100K and we had resized it to 1000 pixels across. If we now go into the files app here and then look at images, we can scroll down and there at the bottom is that Zebra file and you could see it's sized there and it's ready for us to do whatever we want with attached to an email. We can use it for whatever purpose we needed that resized image. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. Now this is probably a longer process than it needs to be. You could still go and build a shortcut if you want to just automatically resize images to 1000 pixels wide compressed JPEGs, but this allows you to adjust all of that along the way and you could do even more. So let's try another image here in photos. I'll take this one and we'll do the same thing to start. I'm going to tap the share button here and go to preview and this creates a new preview image file. We could see it there and now we can resize it if we want, but let's go first and crop it. To crop first, we select it here and then we could adjust the cropping so I can make it something like this. And once I've got that, I could just tap it and I have copy and crop. I'll do crop. So now I've cropped it to this size. Let me enlarge it a bit so I can see what I've got. Now we can also tap here for the markup tools and we could draw on it if we want like that. I don't really want to do that so I'll undo, but you can do other things like for instance, add text, add stickers, add shapes like arrows and such to it, whatever you need to do. So there's a lot you can do right here to mark it up before you go to the next step, which might be that you want to adjust the size or maybe you don't, maybe you just want to leave it at full resolution. It's already cropped in quite a bit, so it should be smaller anyway. So let's go now right to the export option here. Now I can choose the format that I want. I can get the compression down under a certain size like that and then the checkbox there and I could name it what I want like that and save. Now we go into the files app and here we go. There's that image as well as the previous one. Now there's one small issue with this process that I want to point out. It's that it leaves behind that original image. Remember when we first jumped from photos to preview, it created an image file, basically exported from photos as a file, where is that file? Well, in the files app, if you go up to the top level iCloud drive, there is a folder for preview and in there, that's where it's dumping these. So it puts the file there and when we resize them and crop them, it actually changed the image here. That's why these file sizes are smaller than what you would expect. One of them has been size adjusted and the other one has been cropped. So we have these here and we can leave them here, but it may clutter things up and then you've got these duplicates that you probably don't need anymore. So it might be a good idea from time to time to go into the preview folder and then swipe and delete these files if you no longer want them. The ones we exported, of course, we exported into, in this case, documents and then images. They're still there. It's just those temporary ones. The ones that preview was working with before we export it, that are kind of hanging around. Now you can also use the same technique with an image that is already a file. So if you've got a file somewhere in the files app, if you've saved something from the web or used another app and exported it as a file, you could go to that individual file. So I'll go to this one here and it actually is going to open up in preview. When you tap files in the files app now, and you could see instead of just showing you a kind of quick look of it, it opens it in preview. So just by opening the file, we're in a preview now and we can access the adjust size, we can access the export right here, but keep in mind if you adjust the size or maybe use this cropping tool, you'll be changing that actual image file. So one of the things you may want to do first is tap here and duplicate the file and then save it somewhere else. So I'll just save it to this folder here and you could see it gives it a new name and now I can alter this file, maybe make this one the smaller one. I'll make it tiny. Maybe it's supposed to be some sort of icon or something like that. So you could see a hundred pixels wide, you lose all that resolution. But now if I look in the files app, you see, I've got the second one here. This is the original untouched and this is the duplicate that I made. And by the way, if you want to do this with a screenshot, you can. So I'm going to take a screenshot here by using the volume up and side button at the same time. Then I'm going to tap on the little floating thumbnail at the bottom left. Now you don't have the ability in this share menu here to access preview. It's not in the list for some reason. But that's okay because you still have copy. And when you use copy here, I'll just close out the screenshot interface. I can launch preview on its own and then go back up here and say new document and say new from clipboard. And now you can see it takes the screenshot here and I can adjust its size, so maybe instead of the full amount across, I'll make it only 400 pixels across like that. And so now I've lost quite a bit of resolution here by making it only 400 pixels across, but now I can also export it here and then choose another format if I want, and I can compress it to make it even lower resolution, but smaller file size if I needed to. And that copy method may work for other things as well. If you can't share out to preview, you can always try copying the image from whatever app it is you're using and then use that new image button in preview to start a new document with whatever image you just copied. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.