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Images by Edmund vs Preview and Quick Actions

Your Mac already converts and resizes pictures, for free, with nothing to install. Here’s honestly what it does well, and the jobs it was never meant for.

Preview is one of the best things Apple ships and I use it every day, and if you right-click a file in the Finder, Quick Actions will convert it without opening anything at all. Both are free, both are already on your Mac, and for one picture and one small change they’re usually the right answer. So the honest question isn’t which is better, it’s where the built-in ones stop. They stop at about the point where you have fifty files instead of one, where you need a kind of file Apple doesn’t write, or where you want the file smaller without the picture getting worse. That last one is the interesting case: re-saving a JPEG in Preview makes it smaller by throwing a little of the picture away, every time you do it.

Side by side

The same job, two ways.

Images
Preview and Quick Actions
A whole folder at once
Drag in fifty and they all get the same treatment
The Finder Quick Action takes a multiple selection, and Preview can too once you’ve opened them all and found the right menu
Getting a WebP or an AVIF out
Both, plus PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and the rest
Preview will open a WebP and won’t save you one. The Quick Action does JPEG, PNG and HEIF.
Typing an exact width
Type it, and the height follows
Preview can. The Quick Action offers Small, Medium, Large and Actual size, and that’s the lot.
Smaller file, identical picture
That’s what it does if you touch nothing else
Re-saving a JPEG re-compresses it, so the picture is slightly worse afterwards
Coming in under a size limit
Say under 500 KB and it works out how
Drag the quality slider, save, check the file in the Finder, try again
Making a Mac app icon
One picture in, a finished icon file out with every size already inside it
No
Seeing what it’ll weigh before you save
On every picture, and it’s a real conversion rather than an estimate
Save it, then go and look
Cropping, marking up, signing a PDF
None of it. Not that kind of app.
Preview does all of it, and does it well
What you need to run it
macOS 15 or later, and an Apple chip
A Mac. Any Mac, including the Intel ones.
An honest steer

Neither one’s wrong. It depends on you.

Reach for Preview and Quick Actions when
  • It’s one file and one small change. Right-click, convert, done, without another icon in the Dock.
  • You want to crop it, mark it up, rotate it, sign a PDF or pull a page out of one. Preview does all of that and this does none of it.
  • You’re on an Intel Mac, or on macOS 14 or older. There’s no build of this for either, and there won’t be.
Reach for Images by Edmund when
  • It’s fifty pictures rather than one, and opening them one at a time is the actual problem.
  • You need a WebP for a website, or a proper app icon, and neither of the built-in ones will give you one.
  • You want the file smaller and the picture identical, which is the one thing re-saving in Preview can’t do.

Nine jobs, one window, on your own Mac.

Images by Edmund is free. Nothing locked, no adverts, and no account to make. The buttons below say where it has got to.

Download on the Mac App Store Download for Mac

macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.

Preview and the Finder Quick Actions are Apple’s, they’re free, and they’re already on the Mac you’re reading this on. What they can do changes with every macOS release, so treat the specifics as a snapshot rather than a settled state of affairs. This is about which job each one is shaped for, not about quality: Preview is a genuinely lovely piece of software.