How to use the Photo Editor
- 1 Open a picture from your device, drag one onto the page, paste one with Ctrl+V, or start a blank picture with New. Signed-in visitors can also open pictures from My files.
- 2 Use the tools on the left: Crop to choose a shape and trim the picture, Move to position the selected layer, Pan to move around a zoomed picture, Select to limit your edits, Shape to draw rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows, Text to type on the picture, Brush, Eraser, Fill and Colour picker to paint. The Image panel rotates (also by any angle), flips, resizes and changes the canvas size of the whole picture.
- 3 Open the Effects panel to change brightness, contrast and saturation, blur or sharpen, or apply a one-click filter. The slider shows the result live; press Apply to keep it.
- 4 Drop or add more pictures to stack them as layers. Change a layer’s opacity and blend mode in the Layers panel, then reorder, hide, duplicate or merge layers.
- 5 Press Export to download a PNG, JPG or WebP, or Save to keep the picture in My files. Every step can be undone with Ctrl+Z.
What this photo editor can do
The editor covers the everyday jobs people reach for a photo editor for, and it does them in your browser:
- Crop with a free shape or a fixed ratio (square, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, portrait), with the rule-of-thirds grid for composing.
- Transform a layer: scale it with handles or exact numbers, turn it freely, flip it and move it.
- Rotate the whole picture by a quarter turn or any angle to straighten a crooked horizon, flip the whole picture, resize it by pixels with the proportions kept, and change the canvas size to add or remove room around it.
- Adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and colour temperature, blur and sharpen, add a vignette, film grain, pixelate or posterize, auto-correct the contrast, or turn a picture black and white, sepia or negative.
- Draw shapes – rectangles with rounded corners, ellipses, lines and arrows – with a fill and an outline, each on its own layer, and change them later.
- Add text in five font styles with size, colour, bold, italic, alignment, line height and an outline, and click it again later to change the words.
- Select a rectangle or an ellipse and edit only that part: effects, the brush, the eraser and the bucket stay inside the selection; delete it, fill it, copy or cut it to a layer of its own, or crop to it.
- Paint with a brush or an eraser (size, hardness and opacity), fill an area with the bucket, and pick any colour from the picture with the colour picker.
- Layers: add pictures on top of each other, move them, change their opacity and blend mode (multiply, screen, overlay, darken, lighten), hide, duplicate, reorder and merge them.
- Undo and redo as many steps as your device’s memory allows.
- Export to PNG, JPG or WebP and see the file size before you download.
It is a small editor on purpose. For retouching with brushes, selections, text and masks you will still want a full desktop application – this one is for the quick, common edits that should not need an install or an account.
Your pictures stay on your device
Unlike most online editors, this one does not upload anything. Your browser decodes the picture, the editing happens on a canvas in your browser’s memory, and the result is encoded to a file on your own device. That makes it fast, free of upload limits, and suitable for private photos. If you sign in, you can choose to save a finished picture to My files, your private storage on Synsi; nothing is sent there unless you press Save.
Choosing a file format
| Format | Best for | Transparency | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| PNG | Screenshots, logos, graphics with text, anything that needs transparency | Yes | Lossless |
| JPG | Photographs that need to be small and work everywhere | No (becomes white) | Lossy, adjustable |
| WebP | Websites: photos and graphics at the smallest size | Yes | Lossy, adjustable |
PNG keeps every pixel exactly, which makes photographs large. JPG and WebP discard detail the eye barely notices; the quality slider in the export dialog shows the file size as you choose, so you can find the smallest file that still looks right. The MDN image file type guide compares the formats in more detail, and web.dev’s image course explains how to pick sizes and formats for the web.
How blending works
Each layer has an opacity and a blend mode. Multiply darkens (good for shadows), Screen lightens (good for glows), Overlay boosts contrast using the layers below. These are the standard modes of the W3C Compositing and Blending specification, the same formulas browsers use for the web, so what you see here is what you export.
Good to know
- Pictures larger than about 36 megapixels (for example 8000 × 4500) are scaled down when opened, because browsers have a limit on how big a canvas can be.
- Photos taken on a phone are shown upright, as the camera’s orientation says.
- Metadata such as camera details and GPS location is not kept in exported files – a privacy bonus.
- Layers are kept while you edit. Saving or exporting writes one flat picture, so keep the original if you may want to change the layers later.
- While you work, a draft of the picture (with its undo history, as far as it fits) is kept in this browser only, so a reload or a closed window does not lose it. The draft is not a saved file: save or export to keep your work for good, and use Close to remove the draft.
Sources
- MDN – Canvas API: the browser technology the editor draws with.
- MDN – Image file type and format guide
- W3C – Compositing and Blending Level 1
- W3C – Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification
- Google – WebP
Frequently asked questions
Are my pictures uploaded?
No. The picture is opened, edited and exported entirely in your browser and never leaves your device. Only if you sign in and choose Save to My files is the finished picture sent to your private storage.
Is the photo editor free?
Yes. It is free, needs no account and has no watermark. Signing in only adds the option to open and save pictures in My files.
Does it support layers?
Yes. Add pictures as layers, change their opacity and blend mode, move, reorder, hide, duplicate and merge them. When you save or export, the layers are flattened into one picture.
Can I keep the layers to continue later?
Not yet: saving and exporting write a normal PNG, JPG or WebP picture. A project format that keeps the layers is planned for a later version.
Which formats can I open and save?
You can open JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, AVIF and BMP pictures, as far as your browser supports them. You can export PNG, JPG and WebP.
Is there a size limit?
Pictures larger than about 36 megapixels are scaled down when opened, and the file may be at most 60 MB. Files in My files may be at most 10 MB each.
How do I undo a mistake?
Press Ctrl+Z (⌘Z on a Mac) or the Undo button. Redo is Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y. The history keeps as many steps as the memory of your device allows.
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