Some edits do not need a whole photo editor. You want an image turned the right way up, a border cut off, a square version for a profile, a black and white copy to try. Heart Photos does each of those with one press, right where you are already looking at the image.
Where to find them
Open any image of your own, or anyone's public image, and press Photo info (the button at the top, or the I key) to open the panel at the side. Scroll to the section called Studio. Under Remove background you will find a row of twelve buttons. You need to be signed in to see it.
What each one does
- Rotate left and Rotate right: a quarter turn either way.
- Flip horizontally: left becomes right, the way a mirror shows it.
- Flip vertically: upside down.
- Mirror horizontally: the left half reflected onto the right, so the image is the same both ways from the middle. Faces and buildings come out in surprising ways.
- Mirror vertically: the top half reflected onto the bottom, like a lake under a skyline.
- Auto enhance: the light stretched to the full range. The darkest half percent of the image becomes black and the brightest half percent white, so a flat, gray photo gains its contrast back.
- Black and white and Sepia: the same image in gray, or in warm brown tones.
- Invert colors: like a photographic negative.
- Trim borders: cuts away a flat border of one color. On an image whose background you removed, it trims the see-through edge right down to the subject.
- Crop to square: the largest square in the middle of the image.
Your original stays untouched
Every edit makes a new image and leaves the one you started from exactly as it was, so every gallery and every link that shows it keeps showing the same thing. The new image opens straight away in its place, and when you were in one of your own galleries it is put right after the original there.
Each edit is made from the original file you uploaded, never from a copy of a copy, so a rotated image is as sharp as the one it came from. You can edit an edit, too: rotate, then crop the result to a square.
The new image's panel says Edited, names the edit, and links back to the original photo under From. It keeps the original's tags, and an edit of an image made by AI is still tagged Made by AI.
Taking one back
As soon as an edit is made, a note at the bottom says what was done (for example "Cropped to a square") with an Undo button. Press it and the new image goes to your Trash and the original is back on screen.
If you press the same edit on the same image twice, you will not get a duplicate: the note says Already in your library and shows you the one you made before. And an edit that would change nothing, like Crop to square on an image that is square already, tells you so instead of making a copy.
Good to know
- No credits. These edits are free; they run on our server in a moment and never wait in a queue.
- Someone else's image becomes yours, privately. When you edit a public image that belongs to somebody else, the new image is in your library and only you can see it. An edit of your own image is seen by whoever could see the original.
- Very large images. Images over 40 megapixels are too big to edit this way for now.
Try it
Open Heart Photos, pick an image, press I, and try Auto enhance or Crop to square. If you do not like the result, Undo is one press away. And if you are new here, He.art is where the same account asks questions, writes docs and makes images.