Image tools that never upload your photos

Ten tools for the small, annoying jobs photos create. Every one of them reads your file on your own device, does the work there, and hands it back. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is nothing to install.

Most free image tools online work the opposite way: you hand over the file, a server does the work, and you take it on faith that the copy on that server is deleted afterwards. That is a reasonable thing to be uneasy about, especially for photos with faces, documents, or location data in them.

These tools avoid the question entirely by never sending the file anywhere. You can confirm it by opening your browser's Network tab while you work, and the privacy page lists exactly what each tool downloads and when.

The tools

• Photo Editor The big one. Crop, resize, adjust, redact faces or text, remove backgrounds, and batch-export a whole queue at once.
• Compress Images Shrink JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF by quality or to a target file size. Lossy compression is permanent, so keep your originals.
• Resize Image Exact pixel dimensions or a percentage. Shrinking is safe; enlarging can only interpolate detail that was never captured.
• Convert Image JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF, any to any. Each target format pulls its own encoder on first use, and AVIF is by far the largest.
• Crop Image Drag a crop box, or set a fixed ratio or exact pixel size. Cropping discards pixels permanently on the copy you download.
• Remove EXIF Data Strip GPS coordinates, camera details and timestamps by editing the file's bytes, so the pixels are not re-encoded at all.
• HEIC to JPG Convert iPhone photos to something everything else can open. The decoder arrives with your first file.
• Find Duplicate Photos Group exact duplicates and visually similar shots across a folder. It shows you everything and deletes nothing.
• Color Palette From Image Pull a dominant color and a palette out of any picture, as hex, RGB, HSL or CSS variables. Fetches nothing after the page loads.
• Favicon Generator Turn one image into a full favicon package with a real multi-resolution .ico, PNGs, an Apple touch icon and a web manifest.

Which one do you actually need

If the file is too big for an upload limit, start with Compress Images. It keeps the dimensions and reduces quality, which is usually what a size limit is really asking for.

If the dimensions are the problem, for example a 4000 pixel wide photo going into a document, use Resize Image instead. Smaller dimensions shrink the file too, without touching quality as hard.

If something will not open, it is usually a format problem: HEIC to JPG for iPhone photos, Convert Image for everything else.

And if you are about to post a photo publicly, run it through Remove EXIF Data first. A photo taken at home can carry the coordinates of your home, and most people never think to check.

One thing worth knowing about metadata

Re-encoding an image drops its EXIF data as a side effect, so compressing, converting and cropping all tend to remove location data along the way. There is one exception that works against you: Resize Image passes a file through untouched when it is already smaller than your target, which preserves quality but also preserves the GPS tag. Those files are labelled "kept native size" in the results. When removing location data is the actual goal, use the tool built for it.

Other categories

• PDF tools for merging, splitting, signing and converting documents.
• Document tools for resumes and cover letters.
• All tools if you would rather see everything at once.