About PictureToolbox
PictureToolbox is a collection of free tools for converting, compressing, resizing and combining images and PDFs. Everything runs in your browser, so your files stay on your device.
Updated
What the site does
Most online image tools ask you to upload a file, wait while a server processes it, and then download the result. PictureToolbox skips the upload. You pick a file, your browser does the work, and you save the result.
The tools cover jobs people run into every week: turning HEIC photos from an iPhone into JPG, converting WebP and AVIF files that other programs cannot open, making a PDF from photos, pulling pages out of a PDF as images, shrinking a photo to fit an upload limit, and reading text from a screenshot.
How local processing works
When you open a tool, your browser downloads the page and the code for that tool, the same way it loads any website. After that, the work happens on your device.
The conversion code is written in languages such as C and Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, a compact format that browsers run at close to native speed. Heavy steps run in a Web Worker, a background thread, so the page stays responsive while a large photo is processed. Your file is read with the browser's File API, handled in memory, and written back as a download. It is never sent in a network request.
You can check this yourself. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run a conversion. You will see the code files load, and nothing carrying your image leaves the page.
Who it is for
The tools are for anyone who needs a quick fix without installing software or creating an account: people sending photos to a form that only accepts JPG, designers exporting a PNG for the web, students assembling scans into one PDF, and anyone who would rather not hand a private photo to an unknown server.
Principles
These are the rules we build the site around.
- Privacy first. Files are processed on your device. We do not collect or store your images.
- No sign-up. There are no accounts, no email walls and no trial limits.
- Free to use. The tools do not charge, and they do not add watermarks.
- Supported by ads. We plan to show Google AdSense ads to cover hosting and development. Ads stay away from upload and download controls, and visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland are asked for consent first.
- Honest limits. Some formats depend on what your browser can decode, and very large files can run out of memory on older phones. Each tool page says so where it matters.
Open-source components
PictureToolbox is built on open-source libraries with permissive licenses, and we are grateful to the people who maintain them. Each name links to the project. The full license texts are in the third-party licenses file.
| Component | Used for | License |
|---|---|---|
| jSquash | MozJPEG, libwebp, libavif and OxiPNG as WebAssembly: JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF encoding and decoding | Apache-2.0, codecs under permissive licenses |
| pdf.js | Drawing PDF pages as images | Apache-2.0 |
| jsPDF | Creating PDF files from images | MIT |
| Tesseract.js | Reading text from images (OCR) with the Tesseract engine | Apache-2.0 |
| pica | High quality image resizing | MIT |
| Cropper.js | The crop box | MIT |
| UPNG.js | PNG color reduction for compression | MIT |
| UTIF.js | Reading TIFF files | MIT |
| ImageTracer.js | Tracing PNG pictures into SVG | Unlicense |
| gifenc | Writing GIF files | MIT |
| fflate | ZIP downloads | MIT |
| Phosphor Icons | Interface icons | MIT |
| Next.js | The website framework | MIT |
| React | The user interface library | MIT |
Full license texts: /third-party-licenses.txt
How we test file sizes
Where a tool page quotes file sizes, we ran the real tool in Chrome on macOS with its default settings and recorded the bytes of the downloaded file. The test pictures are our own sample scene and a 12 MP version of it with seeded camera-like noise, so anyone can repeat the run. Real photos will give different numbers, and every table says what was tested.
Contact
Questions, bug reports and feature requests go to hello@picturetoolbox.com. Privacy requests go to privacy@picturetoolbox.com. The contact page has more detail.