Image Splitter

What splitting an image is for

Printing large. A poster, a map or a banner bigger than your printer's paper can be split into a grid of page-sized tiles, printed one per sheet, and taped together. Splitting a 3600 × 5100 pixel image 3 × 3 gives nine tiles of 1200 × 1700 — each one exactly the shape of an A4 page in portrait, printed at about 150 pixels per inch, which looks good from a step back.

Panoramas and carousels. A wide panorama split into one row of three or four tiles can be posted as a swipeable carousel, so it reads as one continuous picture as people swipe. A 3240 × 1080 panorama split 1 × 3 gives three 1080 × 1080 squares.

Other uses: cutting a scanned sheet of photos or stamps into separate images, slicing a sprite sheet or tile set for a game, making a jigsaw or a teaching worksheet, dividing a very large image so another tool with a size limit can handle the pieces, and splitting a profile-grid image — for which there is a dedicated Instagram grid maker with the right sizes and posting order built in.

How uneven sizes are handled

Most images do not divide evenly. A 1000-pixel-wide picture split into three columns would need tiles 333.33 pixels wide, and there is no such thing as a third of a pixel. A naive splitter either drops the leftover pixel off the right edge or rounds each tile on its own and overlaps them.

This splitter rounds the positions of the cuts rather than the sizes of the tiles: the cuts fall at 0, 333, 667 and 1000, so the tiles are 333, 334 and 333 pixels wide. Every pixel of the original lands in exactly one tile, none is lost or duplicated, and no two tiles differ by more than one pixel. The tile size shown beside the grid is the size of the first tile; when the division is uneven, some tiles are one pixel larger.

If you need tiles of an exact size — say 1080 pixels square — resize or crop the image first so its dimensions are an exact multiple, then split. The image resizer and crop tools on this site do both.

Names, order and downloads

Tiles are named by row and column, starting from 1 and padded so they sort correctly: photo-r1-c1, photo-r1-c2 and so on, with a two-digit row number once there are ten or more rows, so that row 10 does not sort before row 2. A file manager sorting by name lists them in reading order, left to right and top to bottom, which is also the order to print them in.

The ZIP holds every tile. The images are stored without further compression — they are already compressed, and squeezing them again would only make the ZIP slower to build. To save a single tile, click it in the grid that appears after splitting.

Quality and format

Tiles are cut at the original resolution, pixel for pixel; nothing is scaled. With Same format as the original, a PNG splits into PNG tiles losslessly. A JPEG splits into JPEG tiles, which means each tile is compressed again at the quality you set — 92 by default, visually indistinguishable from the source. Choose PNG if you need the tiles to be bit-exact copies of the regions they came from, at the cost of larger files.

If you plan to print tiles and tape them together, note that this tool does not add overlap or trim margins. Most home printers cannot print to the very edge of the paper, so the edges of each tile lose a few millimetres. Either print with your printer's "fit to printable area" setting and accept small gaps, or add a white border around the whole image before splitting so the lost margin is blank.

The image never leaves your device: it is decoded, cut and packed into the ZIP by your browser.