Image Splitter

// Pick the grid, get the pieces

Splitting a picture is one of those jobs with an obvious shape and a surprising amount of friction. You know you want three across for a carousel, or the nine squares of an Instagram grid, or simply the left half of a screenshot. What you get instead is a site that wants an email address, a queue, or nine separate download prompts your browser blocks after the third one.

This splitter takes the grid straight from you. Tap a preset for the common cuts, or type any number of rows and columns up to twenty each. A dashed grid draws itself over your image the moment the numbers change, so you can see exactly where the cuts land before committing to anything. Below it, the pieces appear as a mosaic you can click through, and one button puts the whole set in a zip.

// The edge pixels most splitters quietly lose

Image widths rarely divide evenly by the number of columns you want. A 1000 pixel wide image cut into three gives 333.33 pixels per tile, and the usual fix is to round down to 333 and move on. That silently throws away the last pixel of the image, and the tiles no longer add back up to what you started with. On a photo you may never notice. On a screenshot with a border, or artwork that has to line up again, you will.

This tool distributes the remainder instead of discarding it. When the division is uneven, the leading tiles are one pixel wider than the rest, so every tile is within a pixel of every other and the full set reassembles to the exact original dimensions. The stats line tells you when tiles differ, showing a range rather than claiming a single size that is not true of all of them.

// No second round of lossy compression

Each tile is copied from the original pixels and written as a PNG, so there is no second round of lossy compression between the photo you dropped in and the files you get back. Tiles keep the source resolution: a 3000 pixel wide image cut into three gives tiles a full 1000 pixels wide, not thumbnails.

All of it happens in your browser. The image is decoded, cut, and zipped on your own machine, and nothing is sent to a server at any point. That matters more than it sounds for the things people actually split, which tend to be screenshots of private dashboards, artwork before it is published, and photos of their kids.

// fair questions

How do I split a picture for an Instagram grid?

Tap the Instagram 3 x 3 preset, then download the zip. You get nine tiles named by row and column, each within a pixel of the others. They are only square if your image is square, so crop to 1:1 first if you want true squares. To make them line up on your profile, post them in reverse reading order: bottom right first, top left last, because Instagram fills your grid from the top left with the most recent post.

How do I split an image in half?

Use the Halves preset for a left and right split, or Top and bottom for a horizontal one. You can also type the numbers directly: 1 row and 2 columns splits vertically, 2 rows and 1 column splits horizontally.

Do the tiles lose any quality?

No. Each tile is a direct copy of the original pixels saved as PNG, which is lossless, so no quality is thrown away on the way out. The tiles are also cut so that no edge pixels are dropped, which means the full set adds back up to the exact dimensions of the image you started with. One side effect worth knowing: because PNG is lossless, tiles cut from a JPEG photo usually add up to a larger total than the JPEG did.

What are the tiles named?

Each file is named after your original file plus its position in the grid, like photo-r1-c1.png for the top left and photo-r3-c2.png for the third row, second column. Rows and columns are numbered from one. Past nine rows or columns your file manager will sort r10 before r2, since the numbers are not padded.

Can I split an image into custom rows and columns?

Yes. The presets are shortcuts, not limits. Type any combination up to 20 rows by 20 columns. If you ask for more tiles than the image has pixels along an axis, the tool cuts as far as that axis allows and tells you what it did, rather than handing you empty files.

Are my photos uploaded anywhere?

They are not. Decoding, cutting, and zipping all run inside your browser on your own device. There is no upload step and no server involved, so the only copies of your image are the ones on your machine.