Snapseed is an app developed by Nik Software, a subsidiary of Google. The app is used for editing photographs on your device which includes processing RAW camera files, one of its biggest appeals. You can edit a RAW .dng file via exposure, highlights, shadows, contrast, structure, saturation, temperature, and tint. You can also perform image resizing before sharing/exporting your photos. Here is a photo my camera took, and beside it is the same photo shot in RAW and developed in Snapseed.

Whether you prefer the changes added to the second image or not, there is a drastic difference in the pictures while retaining the same overall quality, and this is thanks to RAW processing.

Snapseed Developer: Google LLC
Price: Free
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Snapseed is not only for processing RAW files however. It is also used for applying filters, cropping photos, and resizing photos, albeit with a limitation. When resizing an image in Snapseed, you are limited to the options they provide on the width of the image. The maximum width you can resize the image to is 4000 pixels, and the aspect ratio is then kept the same for calculating the height. This means for any files greater than 4000 pixels wide, you can't resize them to anything above 4000. For example, the OnePlus 3 shoots at 4640x3480. If I wanted to resize the image to 4500x3375 (keeping the 4:3 aspect ratio), then I can't in Snapseed. It is, however, possible to increase this limit by modifying a file located in Snapseed's data folder. To edit this file, you will need a root enabled file exploring app, such as the free MiXplorer from our Apps & Games forum! Any other root enabled file explorer should work fine, however. This tutorial may also serve useful for anyone wanting to resize their image to a width that is not available, such as 1000 pixels.

[appbox xda com.mixplorer]

You will need root access for this tutorial, using Magisk or SuperSU. You also need any root enabled file explorer. This has no guarantee to work in future versions of Snapseed. This cannot be used for upscaling images.


Customising Snapseed Image Resizing

Make sure your device is rooted and you have a root enabled file explorer. If you do, you're good to go!

Step 1

First, you should navigate to the /data/data/com.niksoftware.snapseed/shared_prefs/ folder in your file explorer. 

The file we want to edit is com.niksoftware.snapseed_preferences.xml. Go ahead and open that up in your text editor!

Step 2

Look for the string "pref_export_setting_long_edge". It should look something like the following.

As you can see, I changed the value to 4500. This means that my image if I choose to resize it, will be resized to 4500 pixels on the width.

Note that in the actual resize image settings, Snapseed will see the image resizing value as "null". This is okay, as it will still use the value we define.


The Results

As can be seen, our modification worked perfectly! The image successfully resized and kept our metadata intact.


Explanation

It is obvious that Snapseed simply reads the preferences file and engages in operations straight from that. By the "Image sizing" category saying "null", we know the application doesn't know how to display the value we entered. Even though all we added was a number, Snapseed seems to only be able to display proper values it supports. Still, when performing image resizing in Snapseed it still processes the image correctly from the value in the preferences file, and thus we can use any value we want so long as the number we pick is an integer.