Prepare Image

The point of this editor is the thing it replaces: exporting an image, opening it somewhere else to crop it, exporting again, and discovering the file is 4 MB. Prepare Image sits inside the conversion, so the file that gets written is already the one you wanted.

It opens on any conversion that produces an image, from any of the three surfaces — the shortcuts, the Finder menus, or a Klipp in Clipboard History. Each of the three menus offers it as an extra Edit Before Saving… / Converting… / Copying… item. If you would rather it did not appear, turn it off in Settings and image conversions write directly.

#The tools

#Crop & straighten

Drag a box on the image — or its handles — to keep just part of it. The row of cards underneath picks a shape instead: Square, Portrait, Photo, Landscape, Story, Wallpaper. Pick one and it stays in force — drag a corner afterwards and the crop keeps that shape rather than quietly losing it. Original goes back to free-form, and Auto (AI) (Klippster Pro) finds the picture's subject and crops to it. Right-clicking the picture itself offers the same list.

#Resize & resampling

Type a width and height, or pick a preset — 50%, Fit 1920 px for the web, Avatar, App Icon, and more. Lock aspect ratio keeps the shape.

Resampling is how the pixels are made when the size changes. Automatic smooths, which is what a photograph wants. Nearest neighbour (pixel art) doesn't: it copies pixels instead of blending them, so a sprite or an icon scaled up stays crisp and blocky rather than going soft. It only affects resizing — rotating and straightening stay smooth either way.

#Remove or replace the background

Two ways in, for two kinds of picture:

• Subject finds the main subject automatically, with Feather and grow/shrink controls to fine-tune the edge.
• By color removes the background around the edges, with a Tolerance slider and an eyedropper to click the exact colour.

Transparent areas show a checkerboard; you can also fill the background with a colour instead.

#Sizes are measured, not estimated

The size shown next to each format is the result of actually encoding the image at the current settings, not a guess from its dimensions. That matters because the answer is frequently counter-intuitive: a screenshot of mostly flat UI is often smaller as a PNG than as a JPEG, and a photograph is the other way round by a wide margin.

Compare formats puts all four side by side with their real byte counts, so the choice is a fact rather than a rule of thumb. On Pro, the smart pick marks the one that suits the image. You choose the format and quality before you export, and the number you are comparing is the number you get.

#Background removal and OCR run on your Mac

Both use Apple's Vision framework, on-device. No image is uploaded to run them, and they work with no network connection at all. This is the same principle as everything else in Klippster — see Privacy and data.

Extract text returns the text in reading order rather than in raster order, so a two-column layout comes out as two columns read in sequence, not as interleaved lines.

#Adjustments apply at full resolution

The preview is scaled to the window; the adjustment is not. Brightness, contrast, saturation and warmth are applied to the full-resolution image at export, so what you get is not a resampled version of what you were looking at.

#Saving a setup you use often

At the end of the row of shapes there's a dashed + Add setup card. It saves the way you just prepared this image so you can apply it to the next one with a click — and it asks which parts to keep, because not everything you did belongs to every image:

• Crop shape — the shape, not the rectangle. 16:9, not "starting 142 px from the left".
• Size — see below.
• Resampling — smooth or nearest neighbour.
• Frame — everything under Frame: the padding and which sides get it, the backdrop colour or transparency, corner radius, drop shadow, border and the window title bar.
• Rotation & straighten — usually belongs to the one photo you were fixing. Nothing stops you keeping it when a whole batch needs the same quarter turn.

Only what you actually changed is offered. Open an image, go straight to the card, and there's nothing to save yet — so the card says that, and points you back at the panel on the right. Crop the image, set a size, add a frame, and each one appears in the list as you go. That's deliberate: a setup made from an untouched image would carry that photo's own shape at its own size and quietly impose both on every image you used it on afterwards.

Size asks a second question, and it's the interesting one. You set 800 × 450 — but what did you mean by that? Half the size? Nothing wider than 800? Exactly 800 × 450, always? All three are true of the picture in front of you and they do completely different things to the next one, so Klippster lists them and lets you pick:

Half the size (50%)
Longest edge 800 px
Width 800 px · height adapts
Height 450 px · width adapts
Exactly 800 × 450 px

Whichever you choose, the image you're looking at doesn't move — every option produces exactly the size that's on screen right now. What changes is what happens next time. If you picked the size from the Resize Presets menu, Klippster already knows which one you meant and selects it for you.

"Exactly" asks one more thing, because it's the only choice that can disagree with the next picture's shape: Crop to fill trims the excess and keeps everything in proportion, or Stretch to fit honours both numbers and accepts the squashing. Crop to fill decides the shape by itself, so the Crop shape box greys out when you choose it.

Saved setups appear as cards in the same row as the shapes, and clicking one applies everything it carries. The ones that include a crop shape are also in the right-click menu on the picture itself (the others aren't — that menu is about the crop, and a frame-only setup there would be an item that changes nothing you can see). To remove one, hover its card and click the ✕, or right-click it. You can keep up to twelve.

#Where the result goes

The same place the conversion was heading before the editor opened:

• Started with ⌘⇧V → the file lands in the open Finder folder.
• Started from Convert to → a sibling file next to the original.
• Started from Copy to Clipboard as → back onto the clipboard.
• Started from a Klipp in the history → wherever you send it from the inspector.

The editor adds a step; it does not change the destination. When you press the button — Save / Convert / Copy Image — the result goes to the same place that menu normally uses.

When Klippster doesn't already know where the image should go — coming from the notification after a copy, for instance — the editor asks: clipboard, a new file, or a folder. The choice changes the button and the path shown, so you can see where Export will write before you press it.

The ⌄ on the button holds the actions the big button doesn't already do, and only those — the menu adapts to where Export is pointed. Copy to Clipboard and Save as File… send this one export somewhere else without changing the session; for a session opened from a file, Update "photo.png" writes the edit back into that file itself — offered by name, and only while the chosen format still matches the file's own. And Share… opens the macOS share sheet — Mail, AirDrop, Messages and whatever share extensions you have installed — with exactly what Export would write, in the chosen format and quality.

Text gets the same treatment: Prepare Text is this editor's twin for Markdown, plain text, rich text and HTML.