Originally published on letmesend.email. I work on letmesend.email, and this is an adapted edition of that guide.
This article was prepared with AI-assisted editorial support. Its technical claims and examples were tested against Laravel Framework v13.20.0 in an isolated application.
Image handling rarely stays small. An avatar upload becomes a thumbnail, a WebP copy, a storage policy, a validation rule, and eventually a queue job.
Laravel 13.20, released on July 14, 2026, gives this work a first-party home through the new Illuminate\Image component and Image facade. It connects image processing to requests, filesystem disks, configuration, and Laravel's container while keeping transformation pipelines immutable.
This guide focuses on what actually shipped and the production boundaries that still belong in your application.
