AI
How to prepare images before sending them to an AI
Resize, convert and clean your image on your own device before uploading it to a vision model like GPT-4o or Claude — faster processing, and you control exactly what you share.
Last updated July 23, 2026
Why prep an image at all
When you drop a photo into a vision model — GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini and the like — the raw file often carries more than the model needs and more than you may want to share. A little local cleanup before you upload makes the exchange faster and keeps you in control of what leaves your device.
Three things are worth doing first: right-size it, put it in a standard format, and strip the private metadata. All of it can happen in your browser, before anything is sent anywhere.
Right-size it
Most vision models downscale very large images internally, so a 6000-pixel photo straight from a phone or camera rarely helps — it just makes the upload slower, and on some pay-as-you-go APIs a larger image can cost more to process. Resizing the long edge down to something in the 1024–2048 pixel range usually keeps all the detail a model can actually use while making the file far lighter.
If the model only needs to read text or identify an object, you can go smaller still.
Put it in a standard format
Vision models are happiest with ordinary JPG, PNG or WebP. If your image is in a less common format, convert it first so the upload isn’t rejected or silently mishandled. Converting to JPG or WebP also shrinks a large photo, which speeds up the upload.
Strip the private metadata
This is the step people forget. Photos from a phone or camera embed EXIF metadata — the device model, the exact time, camera settings, and often GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken. When you upload that image to a third-party AI service, all of it goes along for the ride.
Removing the metadata first means you share the picture without quietly sharing where you were or what device you used. Ruah does this losslessly — it strips the metadata without re-compressing the image, so the pixels are untouched.
Why do it locally
The whole point is control. If you clean an image up using another online service, you’ve already uploaded the original — GPS tags and all — to get the “cleaned” version back. Doing it on your own device means the only thing that ever reaches the AI is the trimmed, resized, metadata-free image you chose to send.
A quick checklist
- Resize the long edge to 1024–2048 px (smaller if the task is simple).
- Convert to JPG, PNG or WebP if it isn’t already.
- Strip metadata to drop GPS and device details.
- Then upload — knowing exactly what you handed over.