A travel photo workflow has two goals that pull against each other: share quickly, and do not leak where you are. The chain is remove the distraction, compress the set, strip the location, shrink the video, cut a short GIF, then put the best frames into one PDF. Only the object removal uploads.
Do it in that order for a reason. Remove before compressing, because the AI works better on a clean, larger image. Strip metadata after editing, since some editors write a fresh GPS tag or a device string. Compress before sharing, not before editing. Build the album last, from the compressed copies, so the PDF does not carry a forty megabyte photo per page. And keep the originals, because every step here writes a new file and none of them can undo a crop.
1. Erase the passer-by
Image Eraser has two useful modes for a trip. Selected area lets you drag a box over a stranger, a bin or a cable, and the covered area is rebuilt from the surrounding texture, which works best on sky, sand, walls and grass. Text mode erases a specific word or phrase, which is handy for a sign you would rather not publish. Each image can be up to 10 MB and 2560 by 1440 pixels, so a full resolution phone photo has to be shrunk first.
This is the one step that uploads. The photo goes to a server and is forwarded to Volcengine AI MediaKit, with the result deleted after 30 minutes, and a run costs 1 credit; batch size is one image as a guest, three on Free and ten on Pro. The fill is a reconstruction, not a recovered truth, so check the edge at full size. And it cannot remove a watermark or a credit line from someone else's photo, which is both an ethics and a legal line.
Image Eraser
Erase a selected object or a specific word. Uploads the photo and uses credits.
2. Compress the camera roll
Image Compressor takes the whole set at once, shrinks it with a quality slider and can resize by percentage, with a live before and after preview. WebP and AVIF give the smallest files for a gallery or a blog, while JPEG remains the format that opens everywhere. For a printed album later, keep the quality higher and the resize at 100 percent.
Two honest limits. There is no target size field, so you lower the slider until the preview shows a number you accept. And a small screenshot can come out larger, because it was already stored efficiently and a lossy re-encode adds overhead. There is no fixed count; the real limit is browser memory, so a very large trip is better handled in a few passes.
Image Compressor
Batch compress the trip with a quality slider and a live comparison.
3. Strip the location before posting
Remove EXIF strips EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comments from JPEG and PNG without re-encoding the pixels, and it lists GPS latitude, longitude and altitude before you commit. The default mode keeps the ICC colour profile, so colours do not shift, and it re-reads the output afterwards to confirm that no metadata segments remain.
Only JPEG and PNG are covered. A phone HEIC file has to be converted first, and WebP is not supported either. Stripping metadata is also not redaction: a famous landmark, a hotel sign or a room key tag in the picture still gives the location away. If the concern is a home address rather than a holiday, remove the photo from the post entirely rather than trusting a metadata pass.
Remove EXIF
Strip GPS and device data from JPEG and PNG without touching the pixels.
4. Shrink the video
Video Compressor exposes quality, resolution, frame rate and output format, and shows the output size after the run. Travel clips are usually shot at 4K on a phone, which is far more than a chat app or a hotel wifi upload needs; 1080p at 30 fps is plenty, and 720p roughly halves the bitrate again. Typical savings are 50 to 80 percent.
There is no target size field, so tune by quality and read the result. Compression is one-way, so keep the original if the clip may end up in a longer edit. Clips under 200 MB and a few minutes long work best, because the encode runs in browser memory.
Video Compressor
Drop a phone clip to 1080p or 720p and read the output size before sending.
5. Cut a short GIF
Video to GIF turns a few seconds of a clip into a looping file, entirely in the browser. Two to five seconds is the sweet spot. Fifteen frames per second is the default; 10 or 12 gives a much smaller file, while 20 to 24 suits fast motion. Reducing the width cuts the size further, and the preview shows the loop before you export.
GIF has no interframe compression, so every frame is stored as a full image and the result can easily be larger than the video it came from. That is why the length matters more than the settings. A five second loop of a street performer will share well in a chat app; a thirty second clip will be enormous and look worse than the video.
Video to GIF
Make a two to five second loop with frame rate and width controls, locally.
6. Build the trip PDF
Image to PDF places each photo on an A4 or Letter page, in the order you drag the cards, with portrait or landscape, a margin, and a choice between Contain and Cover. Contain keeps the whole frame visible, which is what a holiday album wants; Cover fills the page and crops the edges. Add Page Numbers can number the pages and skip the cover, and Compress PDF can shrink the result, though it does not re-encode the photos.
What this is not is a designed album. There is one photo per page, no captions, no borders and no collage, and there is no template. Every page is held in memory, so a three week trip is more reliable as two or three volumes. If the album is going to print, keep the compressed copies at a generous quality and check one spread before ordering the whole book.
Image to PDF
Order the best frames, pick A4 or Letter, then export one trip PDF.
What this chain cannot do
- Object removal uploads. The photo goes to a server, is limited to 10 MB and 2560 by 1440 pixels, and uses a credit per run.
- No watermark removal. Erasing a copyright mark or credit line from someone else's photo is not allowed.
- The fill can look wrong. A busy street, a patterned shirt or a face behind the box will show a reconstruction artifact.
- No RAW and no HEIC. Neither can be opened here, so convert first in the camera or system app.
- Metadata stripping is not redaction. A sign, a landmark or a room number in the pixels stays visible.
- No target file size. Compression is tuned by quality and percentage, then checked by eye.
- GIF can be bigger than the video. Every frame is a full image, so only short loops make sense.
- No designed album. One photo per page, with no captions, borders or collage templates.