A restaurant's file work is three jobs that look unrelated: make dish photos the right shape, put the menu into one PDF, and keep a short looping clip for a screen or a social post. The chain is crop to a square, compress the set, stamp the shop name, build the menu PDF, then cut a three second loop. Every step runs in the browser, and nothing is uploaded.
The order matters. Cropping after compressing throws away the savings and forces a second encode. A watermark placed before cropping can be cut off at the edge. The menu PDF should be built from the final photos, not the camera originals, or the file arrives heavy and the text is unreadable at thumbnail size. The loop is cut last, from a clip that already looks the way you want it to look.
1. Crop each dish to the shape the listing asks for
Image Cropper offers five fixed ratios, 1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and 9:16, plus a free crop. A delivery listing and a menu thumbnail usually want a square, a printed page can take 4:3, and a story post needs 9:16. The batch holds up to 30 photos, and each file carries its own crop box, so a plate that sits off centre can be framed without redoing the set.
Output is PNG, JPEG or WebP, with quality from 50 to 100 (default 92) and an output width between 16 and 10,000 pixels. Pick JPEG or WebP for a dish photo; PNG only pays off when the image has transparency, which a plate rarely does. The cropper does not find the plate or centre it for you, so every frame is your call. It also does not resize by percentage, which is a separate tool.
Image Cropper
Square and story crops for a batch of up to 30 dish photos.
2. Compress before the photo goes to an app
Image Compressor takes the whole set, leaves the format at WebP by default, and offers JPEG, PNG and AVIF as well. Quality runs from 1 to 100 with a default of 75, and scale runs from 10 to 100 percent. There is no fixed file count: the real limit is the memory of the browser tab.
There is no target size field either, so you lower the slider and read the number on the result card. A plate shot at 75 usually lands far below the camera original, while a small logo or screenshot can come out larger, in which case the tool keeps the smaller copy. Do not compress twice: a second pass spends quality for a small saving. If a platform still rejects the upload, try 50 to 75 percent scale before dropping quality further.
Image Compressor
Batch compression with a quality slider and a live before and after preview.
3. Stamp the shop name, not a logo
Image Watermark draws text, not an image, so a logo file cannot be placed. For a small kitchen that is usually enough: the shop name in a corner at 55 percent opacity reads as a mark without covering the food. The text field holds 60 characters, the size runs from 2 to 20 percent of the image width, opacity from 10 to 100 percent, and the text can be rotated from -45 to 45 degrees. Six positions are available, including a tiled mode that repeats the text across the frame.
Tiled is harder to crop out and makes a menu page look busy, so use it on a delivery listing rather than a printed page. The batch holds 20 photos. Watermark after compressing, because a mark added before the encode is softened by it, and crop before watermarking, or the mark may be clipped at the edge.
Image Watermark
A shop name in one of six positions, up to 20 photos at a time.
4. Build the menu PDF
Image to PDF places each photo on A4, Letter or a page fitted to the image, in portrait, landscape or automatic orientation. Margins are none, small at 18 pt, medium at 36 pt or large at 54 pt. Contain keeps the whole photo visible; Cover fills the page and crops. Drag the cards into the order the menu should read. There is no image count limit, but every page is held in memory, so a long menu is more reliable as two files, for example food and drinks.
Merge PDF joins that photo section with a price list, an allergen sheet or a lunch insert exported from your own document. It needs at least two files, copies pages without re-encoding them, and keeps links intact. A PDF that is already encrypted cannot be merged, so unlock it first.
If the finished file is too heavy for email, Compress PDF rewrites the structure under a 50 MB cap, but it does not re-encode the photos, so the saving is modest. This is page assembly, not menu design. There is no template, no price table builder, no clickable link to an ordering page and no way to edit text inside the PDF. When a price changes, edit the source document and rebuild the file rather than trying to patch the page.
Image to PDF
A4 or Letter pages with drag ordering and a Contain or Cover fit.
5. Cut a short loop for a screen or a post
Video to GIF cuts a clip between 0.5 and 20 seconds, three seconds by default, at 10, 15, 20 or 24 frames per second and a width of 320, 480, 640 or the original. The default is 15 fps at 480 pixels. The encoder builds a 256 colour palette, so the loop plays without a codec and repeats forever.
A GIF is convenient where nothing will press play and expensive everywhere else: a three second loop at 480 pixels can easily be larger than the MP4 it came from. Use three to five seconds for a menu board and drop to 320 pixels if the file still feels heavy. The tool cannot crop, watermark or set a loop count, so do that work in the video first. For a feed that plays video, compress to MP4 instead.
Video to GIF
A three second looping clip for a menu board or a social post.
What this chain cannot do
- No menu template or price table. The PDF is a page container, so the design comes from your own document.
- No logo image watermark. Text only, 60 characters, 20 photos per pass.
- No automatic plate detection or browser background removal. The background remover is a Cloud AI step that uploads the photo and uses credits.
- No target size. Photos, GIFs and PDFs all report the result; adjust the slider or scale and run again.
- No image re-encoding inside a PDF. Compress PDF rewrites structure under 50 MB and leaves the photos as they are.
- No HEIC input. Export HEIC photos as JPEG on the phone or camera first; the image converter here does not read HEIC.
- No video editing beyond the cut. No captions, music, transitions or loop count.
- No single pipeline. Each step is a separate page, so the order has to be run by hand.