Testing AI Image Upscalers: Your Essential Guide to Scalers

Imagine you want to order a canvas print of a family portrait you snapped in the woods, but the photo looks blurry when you preview your print. You don't want a low-quality canvas — and you don't want to replace the photo either. Thankfully, AI-driven image upscalers can come to the rescue and increase your photo's dimensions without quality loss.

How Do the Best AI Image Scalers Work?

Image upscalers are designed to blow up a photo's size without destroying its quality. These utilities use artificial intelligence (AI) to scan photos and correct any blurriness or pixelation. Image upscalers are helpful if you're working with

• Print photos
• Digital photos from older devices
• Digital photos saved in small file sizes

So, next time your cousin sends you her favorite childhood shots to be included in a family photo book, but her email program automatically resized them to a smaller file size, you can use an AI image scaler to increase the size of the photos and eliminate blurriness.

Testing the Best Image Scalers on the Internet

There are a wide variety of image upscalers online. While they all use the same AI-driven technology to resize images, there are some key differences in terms of both efficiency and ease of use.

We've rounded up and testted five of the best image scalers so that you can spend less time finding an upscaler and more time focusing on your next Mixbook project.  We tested the free versions of these image scalers by starting we started with a 400- x 267-pixel image that was downloaded from Flickr using the "small" file size option. This image is similar in size to photos that are sent as attachments on email or uploaded in low-to-medium quality from your phone.

North Summit Lake, Lassen National Park | Photo by Dorothy Bond

Img.Upscaler

Img.Upscaler's AI Image Upscaler is designed to increase image size by either 200% or 400%. To use the service, you can either drag and drop images into an upload box or pick files from your computer. This tool can batch process images, which means that it can upscale many photos at one time.

It took under 30 seconds to resize our original image using Img.Upscaler. The upsized image was decent quality, and it doesn't have much digital noise or pixelation, which can be an issue on other platforms.

Efficiency

The upscaling process takes only a few seconds. This stood out as one of the fastest tools that we tested.

Ease of Use

You have to create a free account on Img.Upscaler before you can resize or edit any photos. The process doesn't take long, but you are required to provide and confirm your email address. The upscaling tool is easy to use. You can also quickly edit your photos after upscaling, which can save a lot of time if you know that you'll need to crop or otherwise alter your resized images.

UpScaler

UpScaler automatically upsizes any image by four times. You can start with shots up to 1200 x 1200 pixels, making this an ideal resizing tool when you want to create large metal prints or a family cookbook that features retro pictures of dishes grandma made back in the '70s.

To upscale photos, you simply drag them onto the screen or select them from your computer. You can upsize up to 10 photos at a time. We thought that the quality of this upscaled image was the best of all the utilities we tested. It has no digital noise and looks very clear.

Efficiency

The upload process was quick and used a dialog box that remains fairly consistent across image resizing sites. Altogether, upscaling took under a minute.

Ease of Use

You don't need to create an account to use UpScaler, which makes it a perfect choice if you're looking for a quick-and-easy upscaling utility. UpScaler uses the same upload format as most other image-resizing tools, making it easy to use. It was also easy to download images after upscaling.

Nero Image Upscaler

Nero's Image Upscaler is designed to resize both photos and digital art — you might notice that the sample photos on the landing page are all digital paintings. Nero is the ideal choice if you're upscaling your child's paintings for an arts and crafts photo book or are working on your own professional portfolio.

Nero automatically upscales photos to four times their original size. That's convenient if you're working on a large project, but we didn't love the overall quality of our upsized photo. It shows some digital noise and blurring that we didn't see with previous upscalers.

Efficiency

This tool took a bit longer to upsize our image than other tools, but all in all the conversion time was still under a minute.

Ease of Use

You don't need to create an account to use Nero, but the number of photos you can resize is capped at 5 per day. The upscaler itself is easy to use with an intuitive interface. You might want to use the Nero app for quicker results — it's available on iOS, Google, and Microsoft app stores.

Fotor Image Enlarger

Fotor's Image Enlarger is part of the photo-editing company's larger suite of products. This resizer automatically determines how much larger it can make a photo without significant quality loss. It increased our photo by two times.

We stuck with Fotor's default parameters for our project, but we weren't impressed with the results. The resized image has patches of blurriness that aren't present with some of the other tools we tested.

Efficiency

Fotor's interface is designed for full photo editing, so it took longer to navigate to upscaling options on this site than on the others we tested. The conversion itself took under a minute.

Ease of Use

If you want to download your image without a watermark, you'll have to sign up for a free account on Fotor. The editor's interface may be confusing or overwhelming since it offers many tools in one place.

Upscale.media

This upscaling and enhancement tool is designed to resize images and enhance quality at the same time (much like Fotor). Upscale.media can increase image size by 200% or 400%. Unlike other resizing utilities, Upscale allows you to resize photos using a URL. That makes it a great choice if you're trying to upscale images that you have stored on a digital photo service for a calendar or acrylic print project.

The quality of the finished photo was decent, especially after we used the "Enhance Quality" option on our upscaled image.

Efficiency

You can upscale one image at a time using Upscale.media's free account option. If you want to resize batches of photos, you'll need to sign up for a free account.

Ease of Use

This tool was relatively easy to use. It will upscale your image by 200% by default, but you can select other resizing and quality enhancement options after your photo is processed the first time.

Our Pick for the Best AI Image Scaler

All of the AI image resizers that we tested performed decently, but one stood out from the rest. UpScaler offered the best overall results — the clarity of the enlarged shot was excellent with no noticeable pixelation. UpScaler's final product was also free of the digital noise and blurriness we noticed with other tools.

Keep in mind that results from AI image upscalers depend largely on the original resolution of your photo too. Resizing older images can be a challenge due to these quality issues. To improve your results, use these image-scanning tips.

Getting Creative with Upscaled Images

Now that you know how to scale images online while maintaining their quality, you can use them in a wide variety of Mixbook projects. Resize to your heart's content so that you can get started on your next poster print or photo book today. Of course, your upscaled images can also be used for large-format projects like homecoming banners and front-yard signs too.