While working on a macbook air m3, you can use the pinch gesture to zoom in and out of the page, put when you select and image in a box (orange outline) and then use the pinch gesture while your cursor is hovering over any part of the image, even parts that are out of the frame/box, it changes/transforms the size/dimensions of the image instead of zooming. While the image is still selected and you move you cursor away from the image the zoom then works.

The attached video shows how using the the pinch gesture zooms in and out until I select the image in the box, and then it scales it instead but once the cursor is no longer over the image, goes back to zooming.