ImageBuddy app icon

Prep any image, fast.

Drop an image and ImageBuddy trims it to the artwork, keys the background out to transparency, wraps it in an outline and a drop shadow, straightens a crooked shot, reframes the canvas, recolors the backdrop, resizes it, titles and captions it, stamps a watermark over the result, and can trace it to a clean SVG — all over a live preview so every cut-out is obvious at a glance.

Or pick it up along with over twenty other apps — ImageBuddy is included in my bundles.

Trim & crop

Auto-detect the artwork's bounding box and shave off the edge — ImageBuddy works out the real border color, not just white. Or draw a manual crop with a loupe and arrow-key nudge.

Straighten

Level a crooked horizon by any angle, with a thirds grid to judge it against and tenth-of-a-degree nudges. Crops in to the largest straight rectangle — or keeps the whole frame, corners transparent.

Remove the background

Auto mode detects the real background color, whatever it is, and knocks it out to transparency while true interior details survive. Lift the subject instead with an on-device Vision cut-out.

Stylize

Wrap the cut-out in an outline, drop a soft shadow behind it, or both — each switches on alone, with its own controls. The outline picks up a width and color; the shadow its own blur, offset, direction, opacity and color. The canvas grows to fit and crops tight, so the result looks the same with trim on or off.

Canvas size

Grow a transparent margin, uniform or per-side, or reframe the canvas without scaling — pick an origin, an absolute or relative size, and an optional fixed aspect ratio.

Resize image

Scale the image to an exact width × height, with an aspect lock so one dimension follows the other — turn it off to stretch to a specific size on purpose.

Vectorize to SVG

Trace the silhouette, or every flat color, into clean scalable paths, with any background color discarded automatically. Export to a file or copy an SVG straight to the clipboard.

©

Watermark

Stamp a watermark over the finished image — text or your own logo, with custom color, size, opacity, margin, and position. Its style is remembered globally, so it seeds every newly added image.

Add a background

Composite the cut-out over a solid color, a gradient, or an image to sit behind the subject — filling every transparent pixel the earlier stages produced, the inverse of keying.

Add text

Give the result a title above it and a caption below — set in bands added outside the artwork, not printed over it. Pick the typeface, color and alignment; each band fits the type exactly, long lines wrap, and a background fills in behind them.

Single / batch

Drop several images, or a whole folder, to queue them in a sidebar. Every queued image keeps its own settings, so tuning one never disturbs the rest — or switch on Sync all to dial in one recipe and have every change land on the whole queue at once.

Copy it or drag it out

Skip the save dialog: ⌘C copies the finished image as PNG, so a cut-out keeps its transparency — or drag it straight out of the preview into another app, arriving as a real, properly named file.

Screenshots

ImageBuddy stylizing a photo of two friends at the Arc de Triomphe — outline, soft shadow and rounded corners on a transparent canvas, with a blue “Best buds!” title added above
ImageBuddy trimming a jetpack sticker to its content, padding the canvas, and dropping it onto a blue gradient background
ImageBuddy applying a saved look preset across four sticker images at once with Sync all, over a blurred photo background
ImageBuddy removing the background from a two-character logo and vectorizing it to a silhouette, ready to export or copy as SVG

Get ImageBuddy

Try it free for 7 days. Available direct or on the store. Requires macOS 13 or later. Buying more than one app? ImageBuddy is included in my bundles, along with over twenty other apps.

Support

Questions or bug reports? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you’ll get a reply, usually within a day or two.

For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.