Free image tools

Which format should you send

JPG for photographs, and for anything an upload form, a print shop or a decade-old program has to accept. It stores no transparency at all, and every save discards a little more detail. PNG for screenshots, logos, diagrams and anything with a transparent background: it keeps every pixel exactly, which is why a PNG photo is so much heavier than the JPG of it.

WebP when the destination is a web page you control, since it beats both at the same visual quality, and stop there: plenty of desktop software still refuses to open one. HEICis not really a choice, it is what an iPhone hands you, and it is worth converting the moment the photo has to leave Apple's world.

One rule sits underneath all of it: converting between two lossy formats never recovers anything. A blocky WebP makes a blocky PNG in a much larger file, and a JPG copied into a PNG carries its artefacts with it. Detail is lost where the picture was first saved, and no tool gets it back.

When an online tool is the wrong answer

Automatic deletion is a real promise, and it still does not override a workplace, school, legal, or healthcare rule that forbids sending files to a third party. A photograph of a document is a document. If a policy says it stays on the device, use software approved for that device, and treat the hour long retention here as irrelevant rather than as a workaround.

Three other cases belong elsewhere. A folder of images is the obvious one: these tools take a single picture each time, so anything past a handful wants a desktop batch tool or a script rather than a browser tab. Work that has to be done again next week wants the same. And editing, as opposed to converting, is not what this is: cropping, retouching and cut-outs are jobs for an editor, and the ones planned here are still in the workshop.

Questions people actually ask

Are these image tools really free?

Yes. No account, no watermark on the output, and no daily limit. The site is funded by ads rather than by charging for the work.

Can I convert or compress several images at once?

No. Every tool on this page takes one image per job, so a folder of holiday photos means one upload each. The exception is a different job entirely: Images to PDF combines several pictures into a single document.

How large an image can I upload?

Up to 50 MB per image. Resize also refuses a side longer than 12,000 pixels, which is past the point where the request is almost always a typo, and any image over roughly 200 megapixels is turned away before it is decoded rather than being allowed to exhaust the server's memory.

Will my photo come back sideways?

No. Phone cameras store the picture one way up and add a flag saying how to turn it, which is what makes photos flip when other tools drop the flag. Here the rotation is applied to the actual pixels before anything else happens, so the file you download opens the right way up everywhere.

Does the camera model and GPS location stay in the file?

No. The output is written fresh, and none of the EXIF block travels into it: no camera model, no date, no GPS coordinates. That is a side effect of how these tools save rather than a scrubbing feature, so treat it as a happy accident on a photo you are about to post, and not as a guarantee for anything sensitive.

What happens to an image after I use a tool?

It is used for that one job and then deleted. Uploads and results are removed from the server automatically about an hour after the job, by a sweep that runs whether or not you download anything.