Changelog

Optimization history

PicEditLab is actively maintained. This is an honest, running record of the tools, formats and quality improvements we ship — so you can see exactly how the product evolves over time. Newest first.

Reviewed by PicEditLab Engineering Team Last updated September 2026
September 14, 2026 Latest

Icon and vector conversions: sharper results, and a page for each pair

  • Fixed: icons built from an SVG could come out blurry. We rendered the drawing at whatever size the file declared, so an SVG marked 24 px was upscaled from 24 px rather than drawn fresh at 256. It is now re-rendered at full resolution whenever the declared size is too small to use.
  • Fixed: ICO to PNG, and resizing an ICO. An ICO holds several sizes in one file. We were reading whichever one happened to be stored first, which is often the 16 px thumbnail; both tools now pick the largest frame in the file.
  • A page of its own for five conversions. PNG to ICO, PNG to SVG, SVG to ICO, SVG to PNG and ICO to PNG each have their own walkthrough and answers now, written against what our pipeline actually does — and available in all 33 languages.
September 10, 2026

Animated PNG, GIF and EPS all compress properly now

  • Fixed: animated PNG came back as a single still frame. Almost every APNG is named .png, and we were trusting the extension — so the file went through the ordinary PNG compressor, which silently discarded every frame but the first. We now detect the animation from the file itself, so an APNG stays animated.
  • Fixed: large animated GIFs could fail instead of compressing. A smoothing step ran before compression and could exceed its time limit on longer animations. We measured what it was actually buying and dropped it: across our test GIFs the results are now closer to the original at the same setting, files come out smaller in most cases, and the whole run finishes around three times faster.
  • Fixed: compressed EPS files would not open. The output was rewritten into a form only Ghostscript could read, so other viewers showed a blank page. We no longer touch the artwork at all — only the data that plays no part in drawing it — and the EPS page now has a checkbox for whether to also drop Illustrator's editing data, which is where most of the saving lives.
  • More headroom on our servers. We upgraded the machines behind the site, so uploads process faster and hold up better when several people are compressing at once.
September 8, 2026

Three editors that run entirely in your browser — crop, rotate and watermark

  • Crop an image by hand or to a ratio. The new crop tool gives you a draggable frame with locked presets for 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and the common print sizes, plus a free mode and an exact pixel readout. Circular crops are supported for avatars. Nothing is uploaded — the file is decoded, cropped and re-encoded inside the page, so a crop finishes as fast as your own machine can draw it.
  • Rotate and flip, at any angle. Rotate & flip mirrors horizontally or vertically, turns in quarter steps, and takes any angle from 0° to 359° — a free angle enlarges the canvas so the corners are never clipped, with a background colour you choose. Up to 100 images at a time, each one previewed as it will be saved. The result is re-encoded pixel by pixel rather than left to an EXIF orientation flag that plenty of software ignores.
  • Watermarks, and masking for what should not be public. The watermark tool places repeating or single text and image watermarks with control over opacity, angle, scale and position. It also does the opposite job: brush a mosaic or blur over a face, a licence plate, an address or an account number before you post a screenshot. Both run locally, which is the only sensible place to redact something.
  • They hand files to each other. All three sit in the same follow-up chain as the rest of the site, so a finished compression or resize run can be sent straight into a crop, and a crop into a watermark, without downloading and re-uploading anything in between.
  • Localised, not just translated. The three editors ship in the languages where we could verify people actually search for them, and the copy was written against each market's own vocabulary and conventions rather than translated from English — print sizes quoted in centimetres in Europe and in the sizes Japanese labs actually print, and the Japanese watermark page built around masking, which is what that audience is overwhelmingly looking for. Crop is live in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean and both Chinese scripts; rotate & flip and the watermark tool in a smaller set, with more added as demand is confirmed.
August 30, 2026

Compress to an exact size in KB, and hand files straight to the next tool

  • Target-size compression. The compressor can now aim at a file size instead of a quality number: type a target in KB, or pick 50 KB / 100 KB / 200 KB / 500 KB / 1 MB, and each file is binary-searched for the highest quality that still fits. Available on JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR. Format and pixel dimensions are left alone — only the encoder settings move. When a target is genuinely out of reach for an image, we return the smallest result we can produce and say so rather than failing silently.
  • Dedicated pages for the sizes forms ask for. New landing pages for reducing image size in KB, with per-target guidance on 20 KB, 50 KB, 100 KB and 200 KB — each one preset to that target, and honest about what resolution actually survives it. They also sit in the main navigation now, under "By target size".
  • Keep working without re-uploading. After a run finishes, the follow-up tool on the download screen now carries your results with it. Compress → resize, convert → compress, any combination — the files are pulled from the finished run instead of being downloaded and uploaded again. Results stay available for the same short retention window as the download itself, then expire.
  • Dithering control for PNG. Full, Medium, Low or Off, alongside the existing colour-count option. Off gives flat graphics, screenshots and UI exports noticeably smaller files with no speckling; Full stays the default for photographic content.
  • Removed a dead AVIF link. The related-tools strip on the conversion pages could occasionally offer an AVIF compression page that does not exist. AVIF is still supported as a conversion target — it just no longer advertises a compressor we do not ship.
July 19, 2026

Quality controls arrive on HEIC, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR

  • Quality slider on four more format pages. HEIC, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR now get the same preset chips as JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF — Maximum, High, Balanced, Compact or Smallest, or drag anywhere on 0–100. Balanced (75) stays the safe default; raise to 85+ to stay close to the original, drop to 60 for previews and sharing.
  • Each format is tuned to its real encoder. Under the hood the slider drives heif-enc's --quality for HEIC (offset by 15 stops, since iPhone originals are already encoded near-max and the file only actually shrinks after dropping a notch), cjxl's perceptual --distance for JXL, opj_compress's target ratio for JP2, and JxrEncApp's 0–1 quality for JXR. The top step on JXR is truly mathematically lossless (pixels stay identical); the other three land at near-lossless.
  • Same controls on the all-format compressor. Mixed uploads that include these formats now share one consistent quality UI, alongside the existing JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF options.
  • Format aliases handled transparently. Uploads to the HEIF or J2K variants pick up the HEIC and JPEG 2000 quality controls automatically — no separate configuration.
  • The after-compress "recompress" tip covers these formats too. If you started from the unified page and want to tweak quality, the follow-up prompt on the download screen now points back to the matching HEIC / JXL / JP2 / JXR page.
July 3, 2026

WebP quality controls, matched across both compressors

  • Quality slider on WebP compression. Same preset chips as JPG and PNG — Maximum, High, Balanced, Compact or Smallest, or drag anywhere on 0–100. Balanced (75) is the sweet spot for web use; drop to 60 for thumbnails and previews, raise to 85+ when you want to preserve photographic fidelity. WebP is more efficient than JPEG at the same visual quality, so the defaults sit a bit higher than JPG.
  • Same WebP controls on the all-format compressor. The chip-style panel now appears alongside the existing JPG, PNG and GIF options, so mixed-format uploads share one consistent quality UI.
July 2, 2026

JPG & PNG quality controls, tidier compression view

  • Quality slider on the JPG and PNG landing pages. Same preset chips as GIF — pick Maximum, High, Balanced, Compact or Smallest, or drag the slider anywhere on 0–100. Defaults now match the backend at 60 (Balanced).
  • Cleaner working view after upload. Once you drop in a file, the hero, format description and SEO explainer collapse away so the file list and compress button sit at the top of the screen. The quality panel drops in right under the compress button — adjust and re-run without scrolling. Clearing all files restores the landing page.
July 1, 2026

JPG & PNG compression — fewer failures, smoother on big files

  • Fixed: some JPGs were silently skipping compression. Certain camera exports and high-resolution product photos used to come back unchanged instead of getting compressed. They now process correctly, and large images go through faster with noticeably lighter server load.
  • Fixed: mislabeled files weren't compressed. When a file's extension didn't match its actual format — for example a JPG that had been renamed to .png — the compressor used to skip it entirely. It now recognises the real format and compresses anyway, while keeping the original file extension unchanged.
  • Cleaner transparent-to-JPEG output. Transparent areas now flatten to white when saved as JPEG, so cut-out product photos no longer pick up a dark edge along the cut-out.
  • Fixed: HDR (EXR) compression barely shrank many files. High-resolution HDR photos and environment maps used to come back only slightly smaller — or occasionally larger. They now compress properly, and the result opens without issues in macOS Preview and other standard viewers.
  • Sharper GIF output on single-frame photos. Photo-style GIFs (single frame, no animation) used to come back visibly softer than the original because the shared smoothing step tuned for animated GIFs was flattening fine detail. We now detect single-frame GIFs and skip that step, so photos keep their crispness. Animated GIFs continue to use the same pipeline as before.
  • GIF quality & color settings are now on the landing page. Quality and max-color controls sit right under the upload area, so you can pick a preset before uploading — and they stay visible after upload for quick re-runs.
  • Steadier processing across less common formats. Tightened memory limits behind the BMP, ICO, TGA, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, QOI and RAW pipelines, so an unusually large upload in one of these formats won't push the server toward its memory ceiling.
June 29, 2026

Image resizing, RAW & EXR compression, and real vector tracing

  • Image resizing is live. Launched a dedicated resize tool — change dimensions by pixels or percentage with aspect-ratio lock and ready-made presets. It's also wired into the "continue editing" steps after compressing or converting.
  • RAW compression. Camera RAW files (DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, ORF, RW2, RAF and more) are now compressed to a smaller lossless DNG using dnglab, with a JPEG fallback when needed.
  • OpenEXR compression. Added compression for high-dynamic-range EXR images.
  • Raster-to-vector SVG. Image-to-SVG conversion now uses VTracer to trace shapes into real, scalable vector paths — with clear guidance on when vectorization works well and when it doesn't.
  • Image to PDF. Each image is rendered onto its own PDF page at 150 DPI, with honest notes about what a PDF export does and doesn't do.
  • Smarter internal links. Compress and convert pages for the same format now link to each other, so it's easier to find the right tool for a file.
  • Index hygiene. Trimmed low-intent, near-duplicate conversion pages from search indexing so the genuinely useful pages stand out.
May 26, 2026

Started building the resize tool

  • Began development of the image resizing feature.
May 8, 2026

Format conversion launched

  • Shipped image format conversion — a wide range of input formats to 14 output formats, including modern formats like AVIF, HEIC, JXL and WebP.
May 5, 2026

Started building format conversion

  • Began development of the conversion engine.
April 20, 2026

PicEditLab went live

  • Launched with image compression. We kept refining compression quality and adding format coverage in the weeks that followed.
April 1, 2026

Project kickoff

  • Started designing and building PicEditLab — a fast, free, privacy-first image toolkit that runs entirely in the browser flow with no sign-up.
We only list changes that actually shipped. The "Last updated" date you see across the site always points to the most recent entry here.