Edit a photo while you upload it

When you upload an image anywhere in the QuickCasa portal, an editor now opens before the image is saved. A sideways listing photo, a crooked horizon, or a square image going into a wide banner slot can all be fixed at the moment you notice the problem, rather than in another program and then uploaded again.

It is optional. Every screen has a Use Original button that carries on with the photo exactly as it was, and closing the editor does the same thing, so you cannot lose an upload by dismissing it.

The tools

• Rotate turns the image a quarter turn either way, the fix for a photo that came off a phone sideways or upside down.
• Flip mirrors it across or down.
• Straighten tilts by a fraction of a degree at a time, up to fifteen degrees either way, for a photo where the building leans or the horizon runs downhill. The image is trimmed back to its original shape afterwards, so you never end up with blank corners.
• Crop frames the part you want to keep. Drag to move the frame and zoom to tighten it, then pick a shape (1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 9:16, 3:4, 2:3) or leave it free-form.
• Extend does the opposite of cropping: it makes the canvas bigger without squashing the photo, which is how a square image becomes a 16:9 banner. Pick the shape you need, then fill the new space with a colour or leave it transparent.
• Colour switches the image to black and white.

Rotate, flip, straighten, crop and extend each stack onto an undo list, and Undo steps back through them one at a time. Black and white behaves differently on purpose: it stays a live preview until you save, so you can switch it off again freely.

Where it appears

Essentially every image upload in the portal, including property, community, building, unit and unit type photos, company logos and branding, profile pictures, Media Library uploads, calendar event type images, map markers, quote branding, and the website builder's media panel. It does not appear on the AI Studio image tool pages, which are already dedicated editors with a larger set of tools.

Editing something already uploaded

Open an image in the Media Library and there is an Edit Image button beside Download. Same tools, with one difference: the button reads Save as Copy, and that is exactly what it does. A new Media Library entry is created and the image you started from is left untouched, so it is safe to experiment. The copy is named after the original with "(edited)" added, and inherits the original's visibility, sharing list and tags.

Two file types do not offer the button, because a copy of them would be worse than the original: SVG, which would be flattened into pixels, and GIF, which would lose its animation.

Worth knowing

When you are uploading, the edited image replaces the original, and the untouched version is not kept, so an edit cannot be reversed once the upload finishes. Undo works for as long as the editor is open and not afterwards. If you want to keep a pristine master copy of a photograph, keep it outside the portal, or upload it first and then edit it from the Media Library, which always leaves the original in place.