Image tools

Free image tools that run in your browser, not on a server

Most of the time you don't need Photoshop. You need to fix one annoying thing about a picture: it won't open, it's too big to email, it's the wrong shape, or it's saved in a format the next app refuses to read. That's the gap these tools fill. Everything here runs locally using your browser's Canvas API, so the image you drop in is processed on your own machine and never gets uploaded anywhere. No account, no watermark, no waiting in a queue.

Let's walk through the problems people actually run into, and which tool sorts each one out.

The iPhone photo that won't open on Windows

This one comes up constantly. You take a photo on an iPhone, AirDrop or email it to a Windows PC, and the file ends in .heic instead of .jpg. Half the time Windows shrugs and shows a blank thumbnail. HEIC is a genuinely good format — Apple uses it because it packs a high-quality photo into roughly half the space of a JPEG — but support outside the Apple world is still spotty. The fix is simple: run it through HEIC to JPG and you get an ordinary JPEG that opens anywhere, including old image viewers, email clients, and that one form upload field that only accepts JPG and PNG.

A quick word on formats, in plain English

You don't need to memorize a spec sheet, but knowing roughly when to use what saves a lot of grief.

JPG (JPEG) is the workhorse for photographs. It throws away detail you can't easily see in exchange for small files, which is exactly what you want for holiday snaps and product photos. The catch: it has no transparency, and saving the same JPG over and over slowly degrades it.

PNG keeps every pixel exactly and supports transparency, so it's the right pick for logos, screenshots, diagrams, and anything with sharp edges or text. The trade-off is bigger files — a photo saved as PNG can be several times larger than the JPG version.

WEBP is the modern middle ground from Google. It usually beats both JPG and PNG on file size at similar quality and handles transparency too. Nearly every current browser reads it, which makes it great for websites — though a few older desktop programs still don't, which is why having a converter on hand matters.

BMP, GIF, SVG show up less often. BMP is uncompressed and huge; you mostly convert away from it. GIF is for simple animations. SVG is vector art that stays razor-sharp at any size — perfect until something demands a regular pixel image, at which point image converter turns your SVG into a PNG.

Files too big to send

Email providers cap attachments somewhere around 20-25 MB, chat apps push back even sooner, and a phone photo can easily be 5-12 MB on its own. Attach three and you're stuck. An image compressor shrinks the file without changing its dimensions, and for most photos the result looks identical to the eye.

Here's the honest part about how compression works: it's a trade. A JPEG or WEBP encoder simplifies the parts of an image you're least likely to notice — subtle gradients in a sky, fine texture in shadows — and the more aggressively it does that, the smaller the file gets and the more visible the loss becomes. At gentle settings you'll cut the size by half or more with no real change. Push it hard and you start seeing blocky patches and fuzzy edges. The sweet spot depends on the picture, so it pays to glance at the preview before you commit. Resizing helps too: if you only need an image at 1200 pixels wide, there's no reason to send a 4000-pixel original. A resizer handles that, and it often shrinks the file far more than compression alone.

Building a website? You'll want a favicon

The little icon in a browser tab is called a favicon, and browsers traditionally expect it as an .ico file. If you've got a square logo as a PNG, PNG to ICO packs it into a proper icon with the standard sizes baked in, so it stays crisp whether the browser shows it tiny in a tab or larger in a bookmarks bar. Start from a square image of at least 256×256 pixels and transparency carries through cleanly.

Why local-only matters

Plenty of online converters do the work on their servers, which means your file leaves your device, sits on someone else's hardware, and you're trusting their retention policy. For a meme that's fine. For a passport scan, a contract, a medical image, or anything with a face in it, it's worth thinking twice. Because these tools use the Canvas API right in your browser, the picture never travels anywhere — you can even pull the network cable mid-conversion and it'll still finish. That's faster too: no upload, no download, no size cap imposed by a server.

Frequently asked questions