5 Ways to Batch Resize Images Without Photoshop

I used to fire up Photoshop just to resize a batch of images. Every single time. Open Photoshop, wait 30 seconds for it to load, create an Action, run File > Automate > Batch, navigate through four dialog boxes, pick an output folder, hope the Action didn’t break on an image with a different color profile, and then wait while Photoshop churned through each file sequentially. For the privilege of making images smaller.

And I was paying $23 a month for this.

Look, Photoshop is a phenomenal tool. If you’re doing compositing, retouching, digital painting, or any kind of complex image editing, nothing touches it. But using Photoshop to batch resize images is like hiring a general contractor to change a lightbulb. Technically they can do it. You’re just wildly overpaying for the skill set involved.

The dirty secret of Photoshop’s batch resize workflow is that it was never designed for this. Actions are a macro system bolted onto a single-image editor. Batch processing is an afterthought built on top of that macro system. You’re stacking abstractions three layers deep to do something that should take about five seconds.

So here are five tools that actually make batch resizing their job — not a side hustle buried under seventeen menus.

The Quick Comparison

If you’re short on time, here’s the cheat sheet. I’ll get into the details for each one below.

Feature	BulkImagePro	BIRME	IrfanView	Preview (Mac)	ImageMagick
Price	Free	Free	Free	Free (built-in)	Free
Platform	Any (browser)	Any (browser)	Windows only	Mac only	Any (CLI)
Install required?	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Resize by dimensions	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Resize by percentage	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Aspect ratio lock	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Format conversion	JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP	No	Many formats	JPG, PNG, TIFF, etc.	Nearly all formats
Batch limit	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Learning curve	None	None	Low	None	High
Crop support	Yes	Yes (per-image)	Yes	No	Yes
Best for	Full batch workflow	Per-image crop control	Windows power users	Quick Mac resizing	Developer automation

Every tool on this list is free. Every single one. The next time Adobe charges your card $23 for a batch resize you could’ve done in your browser, remember this table.

The Browser Batch Resizer That Replaced My Photoshop Workflow

Full disclosure: BulkImagePro is our tool. Grain of salt, and all that. But I’ll explain why it replaced Photoshop in my own workflow before I knew I’d end up writing about it.

The pitch is simple: drag your images into the browser, pick your resize settings, download the results. Everything processes locally on your machine — nothing gets uploaded to a server. No account. No subscription. No “free trial” that expires after your third batch.

What actually sold me was the resize modes. You can resize by width, by height, by percentage, or by exact dimensions. That sounds basic until you realize Photoshop’s batch resize via Actions locks you into whatever you recorded the Action doing. Want to switch from “resize to 1200px wide” to “resize to 75%”? Record a new Action. With BulkImagePro, you just pick a different mode from the dropdown.

The other thing I didn’t expect to care about was the workflow continuity. Say you’ve got 50 product photos for eBay that need resizing to 1600px wide and then cropping to square. In Photoshop, that’s two separate Actions or one complicated Action that does both. With BulkImagePro, you resize the batch, then drop the results into the crop tool, done. Two steps, no scripting, no recording macros that break when you look at them wrong.

If you’re coming from Photoshop specifically because you’re resizing product photos, BulkImagePro handles the full workflow: resize, crop to platform dimensions, and convert to whatever format the marketplace wants. The aspect ratio calculator is handy if you’re not sure what dimensions you need.

The honest limitation? If you need Photoshop-level control over resampling algorithms (Bicubic Sharper vs. Bicubic Smoother vs. Preserve Details 2.0), you won’t find that here. For 95% of batch resize jobs, the default resampling is indistinguishable from Photoshop’s output. For that other 5% — maybe you’re upscaling low-res archival images where every pixel matters — Photoshop’s advanced resampling is genuinely better. But you probably aren’t doing that. You’re probably just making images smaller for the web.

The Per-Image Crop Preview You Didn’t Know You Wanted

BIRME stands for Bulk Image Resizing Made Easy, which is exactly the kind of name you’d expect from a tool that’s been around since the early 2010s. The interface matches the era. But don’t let the dated look fool you — BIRME does something none of the other tools on this list replicate well.

When you set target dimensions that don’t match your images’ aspect ratio, BIRME gives you a visual crop preview for every image in your batch. You can drag the crop frame around to choose exactly which portion of the image gets kept. For product photography where the subject isn’t centered, or portrait shots where the head position varies, this per-image control is genuinely valuable.

If you want the deeper web-tool comparison, our bulk image resizer roundup pits BIRME against Bulk Resize Photos and BulkImagePro in detail. I won’t rehash the full thing here.

BIRME’s limitations are real: no format conversion (what goes in is what comes out), no percentage-based resizing, and a UI that won’t win any design awards. But for its specific niche — “I need to resize and carefully crop a batch of images with per-image control” — it’s excellent. Free, browser-based, no upload. Your images stay on your machine.

I’d reach for BIRME over Photoshop for this job every time. In Photoshop, getting per-image crop control during a batch process means either manually processing each image (defeating the purpose of batch) or using some convoluted Script Listener workflow. BIRME just shows you the crop and lets you drag it. Done.

The Windows Workhorse That’s Older Than Some Interns

IrfanView has been around since 1996. It predates Google. It predates Photoshop’s own batch processing features. And it still works beautifully for batch resizing on Windows.

You’ll find the batch resize under File > Batch Conversion/Rename. The interface looks like something from Windows XP — because it was designed for Windows XP and has been carefully maintained without breaking what works. Select your files, check “Use advanced options,” click the Advanced button, and set your resize dimensions. You can resize by percentage, by specific dimensions, by longest side, or by shortest side. Set your output format. Hit Start Batch. Watch your files appear in the output folder.

IrfanView’s secret weapon is speed. It’s a native Windows application, not a web app running in a browser sandbox. For very large batches — we’re talking thousands of images — IrfanView will chew through them faster than any browser-based tool simply because it has direct access to your hardware resources. I’ve processed 2,000 raw product photos through IrfanView’s batch resizer in the time it’d take Photoshop to index the folder.

The other thing IrfanView gets right is format conversion. It reads practically everything — BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, RAW formats from most camera manufacturers, PCX, ICO, and about thirty other formats I’ve never heard of. If you’re resizing images for different social media platforms and each platform wants a different format, IrfanView handles the conversion in the same batch operation.

The downsides: it’s Windows only. Period. If you’re on a Mac, IrfanView doesn’t exist for you. The interface is functional but intimidating if you’ve never used it before — there are a lot of options, and the advanced batch dialog has checkboxes that can genuinely wreck your images if you check the wrong one (auto-rotate based on EXIF data, for example, can produce unexpected results). And there’s no real-time preview of what your resized images will look like.

For Windows users who batch resize regularly, IrfanView is worth installing. It’s free, it’s tiny (under 5MB), and it’ll handle batches that would make a browser-based tool sweat. It’s not as immediately approachable as dragging files into a web tool, but once you’ve done it twice, the workflow becomes muscle memory.

The Resize Tool Already On Your Mac (Yes, Really)

Every Mac ships with Preview. You probably use it to look at PDFs. You might even know it can annotate screenshots. What most people don’t realize is that Preview can batch resize images, and it’s actually decent at it.

Here’s how: open all the images you want to resize in Preview (select them in Finder, right-click, Open With > Preview). In Preview’s sidebar, select all the thumbnails (Cmd+A). Then go to Tools > Adjust Size. Set your target dimensions. Click OK. Then File > Save All. Done.

That’s it. No download, no installation, no subscription. It’s been sitting on your Mac this entire time while you paid Adobe $23 a month to do the same thing.

Preview respects aspect ratio by default — check “Scale proportionally” and it’ll resize to fit within your target dimensions without stretching anything. The quality preservation is solid for standard downsizing work. And because it’s a native macOS application, it’s fast. Faster than any web tool, faster than Photoshop’s startup time alone.

The limitations are equally straightforward. Preview’s resize options are bare-bones: you get dimensions (pixels or percentage) and a resampling dropdown, and that’s about it. There’s no crop-during-resize option. The format conversion is limited to what macOS supports natively (though that includes JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and HEIC, which covers most needs). And the “batch” workflow is really just “open many files and apply the same edit to all of them” — there’s no dedicated batch processing interface with output folders and naming conventions.

For Mac users who need to resize a handful of images quickly, Preview is the obvious answer. You literally already have it. No tool on this list can beat “zero seconds of setup time.” For larger batches or more complex workflows, you’ll probably want something with more controls — but start with Preview. You might find it’s all you need.

The Command-Line Power Tool (For the Terminal-Comfortable)

ImageMagick is the tool developers reach for when they need to resize 10,000 images at 3 AM via a cron job. It’s a command-line image processing suite that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it can do essentially anything to an image that any other tool on this list can do — plus a few hundred things they can’t.

The basic batch resize command is almost absurdly simple:

mogrify -resize 1200x *.jpg

That one line resizes every JPEG in the current directory to 1200 pixels wide, maintaining aspect ratio. No GUI, no dialog boxes, no clicking through four menus. If you know what you want, ImageMagick gets you there in one command.

Need to resize and convert format at the same time? Also straightforward:

mogrify -resize 1200x -format webp *.jpg

Every JPG becomes a 1200px-wide WebP. For anyone who’s read our image dimensions reference guide and knows exactly what sizes they need, ImageMagick lets you script the whole thing and never think about it again.

You can get wildly specific. Resize only images larger than a threshold. Add padding to hit exact dimensions without stretching. Apply sharpening after downsampling. Process different subdirectories with different settings. Chain ImageMagick with other command-line tools to build full automation pipelines. Our bulk image resizing guide covers some of these advanced workflows if you want to go deep.

The catch — and it’s a real one — is that ImageMagick requires you to be comfortable with a terminal. Installing it means using a package manager (Homebrew on Mac, apt on Linux, or the Windows installer). There are no buttons, no drag-and-drop, no visual preview of what your settings will produce. If the command is wrong, you might overwrite your originals with badly-resized versions (pro tip: always work on copies, or use convert instead of mogrify to write to new files).

For developers, sysadmins, and anyone who writes shell scripts regularly, ImageMagick is the most powerful option on this list. The image editing tools landscape has gotten more user-friendly over the years, but nothing matches ImageMagick for raw capability and automation potential. For everyone else, the other four tools on this list will get the job done without requiring you to learn command-line syntax.

So Why Are You Still Paying for Photoshop (Just For This)?

Let me be clear about something: I’m not saying Photoshop is bad. I’m saying Photoshop is bad at being a batch resizer. The tool is a masterpiece for what it’s designed to do. Batch resizing just isn’t one of those things.

Here’s a reality check. To batch resize in Photoshop, you need to:

1. Open Photoshop ($23/month if you don’t already have it)
2. Create a new Action (Window > Actions > New Action)
3. Record yourself resizing one image (Image > Image Size, set dimensions, OK)
4. Save and close the image inside the Action recording
5. Stop recording the Action
6. Go to File > Automate > Batch
7. Select the Action you just recorded
8. Choose the source folder
9. Choose the destination folder
10. Configure error handling and file naming
11. Click OK and wait

That’s eleven steps. To make images smaller. And if you want to change the dimensions next time, you need to record a new Action or edit the existing one (which has its own set of pitfalls).

Or you could drag files into a browser window, type “1200” in a box, and click download.

I’m not going to tell you which approach is better. I think the answer is self-evident.

Picking The Right Tool For Your Situation

If I’m being honest, the “best” tool depends on where you are and what you’re working with.

Already have a Mac and just need a quick resize? Use Preview. It’s already installed. Don’t overthink it.

On Windows and processing large batches regularly? Install IrfanView. The five-minute setup pays for itself on the first batch.

Want something that works on any computer, right now, with no setup? BulkImagePro’s resizer or BIRME. Both are browser-based, both are free, both keep your files local. BulkImagePro gives you more resize modes and a suite of related tools (compression, cropping, conversion). BIRME gives you that per-image crop preview.

Building automation or processing at massive scale? ImageMagick. Nothing else comes close for scripted workflows.

Need Photoshop for other things but resent using it for batch resize? Keep Photoshop for the work that actually needs it. Use one of these five tools for the resizing. They’ll do it faster, and you’ll stop dreading the batch processing dialog.

The broader lesson is that specialized tools almost always beat general-purpose tools for specific tasks. Photoshop tries to be everything to every image editor. These tools just try to resize your images quickly. It’s not a fair fight, and it shouldn’t be.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Photoshop batch resize images?

Yes, Photoshop can batch resize using Actions and the File > Automate > Batch command. You record an Action that resizes a single image, then apply that Action to an entire folder. It works, but it requires a Creative Cloud subscription ($23/month for the Photography plan), a multi-step setup process, and familiarity with Photoshop's Action system. For most people who just need to resize a batch of images, free alternatives like BulkImagePro, IrfanView, or even Mac's built-in Preview are faster and simpler.

What's the fastest way to batch resize images for free?

Browser-based tools like BulkImagePro are the fastest for most people because there's nothing to install -- you just open the site, drop your images in, set your dimensions, and download. For Mac users, Preview is technically faster since it's already on your computer. For Windows users who resize frequently, IrfanView is extremely fast once installed. The "fastest" option really depends on what's already available on your machine and how many images you're processing.

Do free batch resize tools reduce image quality?

Any resize operation that makes an image smaller discards some pixel data, which technically reduces quality. But for practical purposes, downsizing a 4000px photo to 1200px produces excellent results in all five tools listed here. The visible quality difference between these free tools and Photoshop's output is negligible for standard web and e-commerce use. Where you might notice differences is in extreme upscaling (making small images larger), where Photoshop's advanced resampling algorithms like Preserve Details 2.0 have a genuine edge.

Is there a Photoshop batch resize alternative that works offline?

Yes. IrfanView (Windows), Preview (Mac), and ImageMagick (all platforms) all work completely offline with no internet connection needed. The browser-based tools -- BulkImagePro and BIRME -- need an internet connection to load the web page, but once loaded, all image processing happens locally on your device. Your images are never uploaded to a server with any of the five tools listed here.

Can I batch resize and convert image formats at the same time?

BulkImagePro, IrfanView, and ImageMagick all support resizing and format conversion in the same operation. For example, you can resize a folder of PNGs to 1200px wide and output them as WebP files in one step. BIRME doesn't support format conversion at all, and Preview's conversion options are limited. If simultaneous resize and conversion is important to your workflow, BulkImagePro (browser-based) or IrfanView (Windows desktop) are the most accessible options.

What's the best batch resize tool for e-commerce product photos?

For e-commerce product photos, BulkImagePro is a strong choice because it combines resizing with cropping and compression in one workflow -- you can resize to platform dimensions, crop to square for marketplace listings, and compress for fast page loads without switching tools. BIRME is excellent if you need per-image crop control to ensure each product is properly framed. IrfanView is the fastest option for very large catalogs (hundreds or thousands of images) on Windows. The right tool depends on your batch size and whether you need cropping as part of the process.

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Ready to ditch the Photoshop batch resize workflow? Try BulkImagePro’s batch resizer — drag your images in, pick your dimensions, and download. No subscription, no Actions, no scripting. Works on any device with a browser, and your images never leave your machine. Need to crop too? The bulk crop tool is one click away.