Filter Images by Aspect Ratio — Download Only the Shapes You Need
A scraped page rarely gives you one clean shape. Product shots sit beside wide banners, sidebar strips, icons, and hero images that all land in the same result list. Minimum width and height filters help, but they do not tell you whether an image is square, widescreen, or tall.
The preview and filter pass lets you drop unwanted files before the batch writes to disk.
That is why it helps to filter images by aspect ratio before you download.
Aspect ratio in one minute
Aspect ratio is the relationship between width and height. A 1600×900 image and an 800×450 image both share a 16:9 widescreen shape even though their pixel counts differ. Ratio describes proportion, not resolution.
A messy list of sources going in and a filtered, named download set coming out is the core workflow.
Once you think in shapes instead of raw dimensions, mismatched files become easier to spot.
Common ratios you will see online
- 1:1 square images for profiles, product thumbnails, and grid posts.
- 4:3 and 3:2 classic photo shapes still common on older layouts and camera workflows.
- 16:9 widescreen headers, video frames, and banner imagery.
- 9:16 tall vertical assets for phone-first layouts and story-style content.
Extremely wide or extremely tall ratios often signal decorative bars, sprites, or interface chrome rather than the photos you wanted.
Use ratio filters before you commit
In the side panel, aspect-ratio filters include square, landscape, and portrait presets, plus a custom min/max range when you need tighter control. Combine them with dimension filters, file type filters, domain filters, and text search in URLs or alt text to narrow a noisy page down to useful assets.
Practical examples:
- Need only square product shots? Keep square ratios and drop wide promotional banners.
- Building a widescreen header set? Focus on landscape ratios such as 16:9.
- Cleaning clutter? Exclude extreme ratios that usually mark strips, bars, or UI decoration.
Keep ratio in mind during resize too
Filtering by shape is only the first step. If you resize later, a fit-inside resize preserves proportions within a size box, cover fills the box while keeping ratio, and fill stretches to exact width and height even when that changes the shape.
The cleanest workflow is usually filter for the ratio you want first, then resize in a mode that respects it. That saves time sorting mismatched downloads and reduces distorted output later.
Two places the ratio decision can happen
Ratio filtering is not one feature with one home. During a scan, the side panel can filter by size or type and drop copies, which is where a rough pass belongs because you are still collecting. Once pictures have been gathered into a download, Filter images opens on top of Home and lets you keep or drop them against the actual list before it is saved.
Running the rough filter at scan time and the final keep-or-drop at download time keeps the two jobs separate. It also means a mis-shaped image you already dropped during the scan never reaches the resize step, so you are not paying to resize something you were going to remove.
Continue reading: strip EXIF metadata from images.