Your site is loading slowly, and the culprit is large image files. You’re here because you’re searching for free photo editing tools for bloggers that can easily help you solve this problem.
Visuals are extremely important to creating a dynamic-looking, professional blog.
They can elevate your site by working with your branding and illustrating your points. After all, an image is worth a thousand words.
Finding the right free online photo editing tool will help you upgrade your blog visuals and make your site stand out.
Nobody wants to visit a site with images that look amateurish. You know, the ones – with poor lighting, blurriness or no cropping.
You want your blog to look professional, even from the start!
While professional stock photos are the easiest to use, if you’re using your own photos, they need to look amazing.
As I’ll show you in a moment, there are many free image editing platforms available online to bloggers and social media influencers.
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Top Free Photo Editing Tools For Bloggers
All the free online photo editing tools I’ve listed offer entry features.
They are an introduction to what each of the photo editing platforms and tools offers. You get a taste of how they work, and you can create so much with them as is.
For many bloggers, the free versions are excellent and will meet your needs.
I’d use these with my photos as well as those that are stock photos. Sometimes tweaks are needed, such as crops. Of course, you have to also pay attention to optimizing images for SEO purposes.
But back to the free tools. Here are the best of the best!
1. Pixlr E
Pixlr is a freemium photo editing tool that has many features for editing your images. It also includes many of the favourite features found in Adobe Photoshop. It feels a bit like Photoshop too, with how its left-hand toolbar.
This is my favourite free online photo editing tool that I use daily.
It has some unique features that make it a go-to for many, including dodge and burn the colour, heal, cropping, etc. The standard adjustments to brightness, contrast, and colour are all there too.
What I LOVE about Pixlr is the super-easy way you can optimize your images so that they are saved as small files.
When you’re saving an image, choose JPG, resize it to your theme’s minimum image size, and move the quality slider to 70%.
You won’t lose too much quality, but you’ll save on the size of your image file. This loads your posts MUCH faster than when you use large image files. You can also save images in WebP format, making them fast-loading.
AI features in Pixlr make it easy to create AI-generated images, face swaps, remove objects and backgrounds, and generative fill.
It’s a useful free online photo editing tool with many cool features that make it so much easier to do more editing.
Try PIXLR-E for free. Premium option with extra features available.
2. BeFunky
From desktop to app, BeFunky is one of the top free image editing tools with a whole slew of features, including AI enhancements (upgraded version) that you’re going to love.
For bloggers like myself, it has a super easy save feature that gives you the power to save a file in a lower quality – EASILY and quickly. You also see what size it is.
It has all the key editing features you need to update and modify your photos to work with your needs.
BeFunky also has a Collage maker, as well as a graphic designer feature, which gives you a growing number of options for designs. Not as robust as Canva, but good enough for anybody on a budget.
The premium upgrade for BeFunky, which unleashes a whole slew of additional features, is an affordable monthly rate.
3. Photopea
Photopea is a simple but powerful, free browser-based editor that gives you an easy way to edit photos and create graphics online.
The best thing is that it’s free. It opens right in your browser and feels very similar to Photoshop. It’s ideal for quick edits when you’re working on blog posts or social media content.
You can handle key photo and design activities:
- Simple tweaks, such as cropping, resizing, brightening, and colour corrections,
- More advanced edits like layering, masking, adding text, and applying filters or effects
- Creating branded graphics or adding subtle overlays and titles to your featured images.
While it’s not the most exciting of free image editing tools, it does the job. Since Photopea runs locally in your browser, it’s also more private than many cloud-based editors.
Try Photopea today.
4. Fotor
Another one of the best free image editing tools is Fotor.
Like the other tools mentioned above, it does great photo editing. It also allows you to design social media images.
However, the big thing about Fotor is that it has great tools for portraits.
If you’ve got a selfie or photo of somebody that needs to be tweaked and edited, this is a great desktop photo editing tool for it.
The free version offers you tools like removing wrinkles, blemish fixes, and teeth whitener. Other features are available with the pro version.
Fotor is a bit of a Canva wannabe. It even has many of the same familiar options on the left-hand side.
Doesn’t it look familiar, Canva users?
Saving images in a resized format isn’t as easy as with Pixlr, which is unfortunate. It’s a feature that bloggers short on time love as it makes them more productive.
Try Fotor for free. A paid version with access to other cool features like removing backgrounds, templates and more is available.
5. Adobe Express
From Adobe comes a simple, easy-to-use photo and design editor. It’s one of the top free photo editing tools for bloggers, which is a browser-based tool. There’s no learning curve needed.
Adobe Express lets you:
- Resize, crop, and enhance photos quickly
- Add text, fonts, and simple animations
- Apply filters, effects, and background removal
- Use ready-made templates for blog headers and social media graphics
- Create and reuse brand colours, fonts, and logos
For bloggers, Adobe Express is great for quick edits, but not so much for advanced design work. It’s good for creating on-brand blog images, Pinterest pins, and promotional graphics that look polished.
Try Adobe Express today.
Creating Beautiful Blog & Social Media Visuals Easily
There you go, five great free photo editing tools for bloggers!
These photo editing platforms are all free to use, and they can quickly upgrade your average phone images from mediocre to beautiful in a matter of minutes.
Taking the time to make tweaks, crop and improve the quality of an image can take your blog from amateur to professional.
Check them out, and tell me which ones YOU love to use!
Make sure you are using photos properly if they aren’t your own. Read up on how to blog legally, including tips on crediting photos.
| RELATED: 15 Free Blog Tools For Beginner Bloggers
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Originally published October 19, 2022.
Yes, you are totally correct. Bloggers frequently need to alter their photos before publishing the perfect image on their site. But I prefer Adobe Lightroom, which is quite useful to me.
It’s a good one too!
this article was very informative, i never thought of using canva to do photo editing
It’s not the best solution, but it’s getting better.
I think Pixlr is the best free online photo editor.
For the most part – things are changing with some of the free features. They’re limiting how many you can save in a day. Time to search for a new free one!
Hey MARGARET! Thanks for the nice article I got this post very engaging and got information about the top photo editing tools, great keep it up.
This article was very informative.
I use the Gimp. But for less complex editor I usually use PaintNET.
And I have a XPPen Deco Fun drawing tablet, Using a pen so much more intuitive than using a mouse. I feel like using a mouse to edit is like trying to use a brick to draw instead of a pencil.
I’m already using Canva Pro, but I’m going to look into Pixlr E. Sounds like it might be a good photo one to try.
It’s one of my all-time favourite tools for images that I add to my site. I always optimize them with it.