Summary
- Paint 3D excels at image resizing and cropping tasks.
- In addition to resizing, Paint 3D offers simple and easy-to-use photo editing tools, as well as a straightforward image overlay tool.
- The app is no longer on the Microsoft Store, but various online repositories offer Paint 3D for download and installation.
While Microsoft removed Paint 3D from the Microsoft Store in early November 2024 and sent it to the big Recycle Bin in the sky, I’m still using the app and will never delete it from my Windows PC. Here’s why.
Paint 3D is Excellent For Resizing Images
Despite Paint 3D not being available anymore, I find it handy for simple image editing tasks, especially resizing.
To resize the image or its canvas, all you have to do is select the “Canvas” tab. Once there, you can seamlessly resize the image you’re working with or just resize the canvas. The latter option is useful when you work with transparent backgrounds, which I often do when creating buying guides.
If you decide to resize the whole image and not just the canvas, you can resize the width or height independently or keep the current aspect ratio and just resize one side. There’s also the free-form cropping tool, allowing you to crop the part you want to keep without worrying about image resolution and aspect ratio.
If you want to crop part of the image in a specific aspect ratio, there’s the Crop tab. The crop menu includes various frequently used aspect ratios to pick from, along with a free-form crop tool. Or, you can create a custom aspect ratio to crop the image to, lock it, and crop the part you want.
Now, while I use Photoshop and Lightroom, my go-to resizing and cropping app is Paint 3D because it performs better and is much more user-friendly than the Adobe Duo. It also launches much faster, which doesn’t sound that exciting but is really noticeable in practice.
Photoshop, on the other hand, features a pretty basic image-resizing tool that is hidden in the menu. The app’s crop tool is helpful, but the one in Paint 3D is much more straightforward, and resizing a canvas in Photoshop is not user-friendly at all. Lastly, Lightroom is made for batch photo editing and isn’t well-suited for image resizing. However, its crop tool is pretty useful and easy to use.
The App is Also Awesome for Simple Photo and Image Editing Tasks
Aside from its excellent image resizing and cropping capabilities, Paint 3D is also pretty handy when you have to do some relatively simple screenshot annotation. It comes with a set of 2D shapes you can add to the image, there’s the usual text tool, and you can also add 3D shapes and models if you want to.
Last but not least, I also like the app’s image overlay tool, which is super simple to use. You just open the image, then open Windows Explorer (or your favorite file explorer), select the image you want to overlay on top of the original, copy it, and paste directly into Paint 3D.
While Photoshop’s overlay tool is straightforward to use, I prefer Paint 3D’s because the app launches much faster, and I don’t have to open both images in the app, just the one I want to use as the background layer.
How to Download and Install Paint 3D
The good news is that, while Paint 3D isn’t available on the Microsoft Store anymore, the online community has archived the app and made it available for download. You can use this GitHub page that contains a bunch of different Paint 3D versions that work on Windows 10 and Windows 11.
Just select your download source (GitHub or Mega), download the bundle, and then manually install the APPX you just downloaded. Alternatively, you can use this GitHub repository, which has more versions of the app but only supports GitHub downloads.
While Microsoft pulled a Microsoft, and banished Paint 3D from its store for good, I don’t plan to uninstall it anytime soon. In fact, since the app’s available in multiple online repositories, I plan on using it as long as it continues working on Windows OS, at least until Microsoft, or someone else, releases a worthy successor.