Free image upscaler — make a photo bigger without it going soft
Drop in a small photo and get it back at 2×, 4× or 8× the size, with the edges rebuilt rather than stretched. Enough to clear Etsy's 2000px recommendation from a phone snap.
Drop a photo here
Or click to browse — you can paste one straight from your clipboard too.
Choose an imageOpening the editor…
Your image is on its way. Pick a scale when it lands and it starts straight away.
Drag the handle and look at the edges.
Enlarging a photo the ordinary way spreads the pixels you already have across more space, so everything gets softer and the blocky squares left by JPG compression get bigger too. An upscaler works the other way round: it rebuilds the edges as it grows the image.
Illustration · your own upload is the real test
Pick how much bigger you need it.
The scale multiplies both sides, so 4× on a 500 × 500 photo gives you 2000 × 2000 — four times the width, sixteen times the pixels.
A 1000px photo becomes 2000px. The everyday choice — enough to take a decent phone photo up to Etsy's recommended size.
A 500px photo becomes 2000px. This is the one that rescues an old listing image or something saved off a chat app.
For genuinely tiny originals, or when you need print resolution. Takes the longest, and the further you push the more the model is inventing.
Marketplaces want big photos, and phones do not always give you one.
Both major marketplaces reward large images, because both let a buyer zoom in. If your photo is too small the zoom either does not appear or turns to mush, and a buyer who cannot inspect a product is a buyer who scrolls past it.
Etsy asks for 2000px
Etsy's own guidance is 2000 pixels on the shortest side, with around 3000px preferred so zoomed views stay sharp. A photo cropped down from a phone shot, or one pulled back out of a chat app, often lands well under that — 4× turns a 500px crop into exactly 2000px.
eBay needs 1600px for zoom
eBay accepts images from 500 × 500 pixels, but the zoom and enlarge features only switch on at around 1600px on the longest side. Meeting the minimum is not the same as getting the feature, and the feature is what sells.
Supplier photos are small
Images pulled from a supplier catalogue are frequently 600–800px because that is all the catalogue ever needed. Upscaling gets them to listing size without waiting on a supplier who may not have anything larger.
Screenshots and chat apps
Anything that has been through WhatsApp or a screenshot has been resized and recompressed at least once. Those are the images that look fine on a phone and fall apart the moment they are on a listing page.
Print on demand
Print work is measured differently — a design that looks crisp on screen at 1000px is not enough for a poster or a shirt. 8× exists for exactly this, though a genuinely high-resolution original is always better than a rescued one.
Old listings you want to refresh
A shop that has been running for years usually has early listings shot on an older phone. Upscaling them is the cheapest way to bring an old catalogue up to the standard of the new one without re-photographing everything.
What an upscaler can do — and what it cannot.
This is the part most tools skip, and it is the part worth understanding before you spend a credit. An upscaler does not recover detail. It cannot, because the detail is not in the file. What it does is invent detail that is plausible given everything it has seen.
Edges, shapes and surfaces
Product outlines, fabric weave, wood grain, printed patterns and general texture come back convincingly. The model has seen millions of examples of what these look like at full size, so its guess is usually a good one and the result reads as a sharper photo.
Small text and fine print
Writing that was already unreadable does not become readable — it becomes sharp letters that are the wrong letters. If a label or a serial number matters, re-photograph it. A confidently wrong number on a listing is worse than a blurry one.
Motion blur and bad focus
A shot that was out of focus or moved during the exposure has lost its information differently — the pixels are not small, they are wrong. Upscaling makes a bigger version of the same mistake. Faces are the other thing to watch: invented facial detail rarely looks like the person.
Upscaling is not the same as resizing.
When you drag a corner in any ordinary image editor, the software fills the new space by averaging the pixels it already has — bicubic interpolation, if you want the term. It is fast and it is honest, and it always looks soft, because averaging cannot produce an edge that was not there.
A model trained on pairs of small and large images does something different. It has learned what a sharp version of a soft edge tends to look like, so instead of averaging it reconstructs. That is why the result looks photographed rather than stretched — and also why it is a guess rather than a recovery.
- Need exact dimensions? Use the resizer — it is 1 credit and it does not invent anything.
- Need it larger and sharper? That is this tool. Upscale first, then resize down to the exact size you need.
- Making a file smaller? Shrinking never needs an upscaler — the compressor handles that for 1 credit.
- Order matters. Cut the background out after upscaling, not before — a larger image gives the cutout a cleaner edge to follow.
Four habits that make upscaling work.
- Start from the largest original you have. Upscaling a 1200px file to 2400px beats upscaling a 400px screenshot of the same photo to the same size, every time.
- Do not upscale twice. Running 2× and then 2× again gives a worse result than a single 4× — the second pass is guessing from the first pass's guesses.
- Pick the scale you actually need. 8× on an image that only needed 2× costs more credits and gives the model more room to invent things you did not ask for.
- Check at full size before you upload. Zoom to 100% and look at any text, logo or serial number. That is where invention shows up first.
3 for 2×, 6 for 4×, 8 for 8×. New accounts start with 100 credits free — around 33 images at 2× — with no card and no subscription. The same balance runs every other tool in the suite.
Upscaling, answered.
Is the image upscaler free?
Every new account gets 100 credits at signup with no card required. A 2× upscale costs 3 credits, 4× costs 6 and 8× costs 8 — so around 33 images at 2× before you have paid anything. After that, credit packs are a one-off purchase rather than a subscription.
How much bigger can it make my photo?
Up to eight times on each side, which is 64 times the pixel count. A 500 × 500 image at 8× comes out at 4000 × 4000. Whether that is worth doing depends on the original — see the section above on what upscaling can and cannot do.
How long does it take?
Longer than most image jobs, because there is far more pixel data to produce. Expect roughly thirty to sixty seconds, with 8× at the slow end. The editor shows progress while it runs.
Will it fix a blurry or out-of-focus photo?
No, and no upscaler will. Blur from bad focus or camera shake is a different problem from a small image — the detail was never recorded, so there is nothing to enlarge. You will get a larger, sharper-looking version of a blurry photo, which usually still reads as blurry.
Does upscaling change what is in the picture?
It fills in detail that was not in the original, so in a strict sense yes. On texture, fabric and product surfaces you will not notice. On small text, logos and faces you can, which is why we would not recommend it for anything a buyer will read as a factual claim.
What size does Etsy want?
Etsy recommends 2000 pixels on the shortest side, and around 3000px if you want zoomed views to stay sharp. If your original is 500px, a 4× upscale lands exactly on 2000px.
What size does eBay want?
eBay accepts photos from 500 × 500 pixels, but its zoom and enlarge features need roughly 1600px on the longest side to switch on. Clearing the minimum is not the same as getting the zoom, and the zoom is what buyers use.
Should I upscale before or after removing the background?
Upscale first. A larger image gives the background remover a cleaner edge to follow, so the cutout comes back tidier. Doing it the other way round means cutting a soft edge and then enlarging the mistakes.
What file types and sizes can I upload?
JPG, PNG and WEBP, up to 10 MB per image. Transparency in a PNG is preserved through the upscale, so a cutout stays a cutout.
Is there a watermark on the result?
No. What you see in the editor is what downloads — full resolution, no stamp, no lower-quality preview held back behind a paywall.
Everything else you can do to the same image.
Once a photo is open in the editor, every tool below is one click away — no re-uploading.
Take your smallest photo up to listing size.
The one you gave up on is the honest test. Drop it in and see how far it goes.