Welcome to TinyPixel: what we are building and why

Welcome to TinyPixel

If you're here, you've probably got an image problem to solve. Maybe someone sent you a .heic file and you can't open it. Maybe you need to shrink a photo before uploading it somewhere. Maybe you just want to rotate something without downloading a whole photo editor.

Welcome to TinyPixel. It's a free site with image tools that run entirely in your browser. Your files never leave your device. There's no upload queue, no account to create, and no "we'll email you when it's done." You pick a file, the browser crunches it, you download the result. That's it.

How this actually works

Most image tools online work like this: you upload your file to someone's server, their server processes it, then sends it back. That's fine until you think about what happens to your photo on that server. Does it sit in a temp folder? Get scooped up for AI training? Get breached in six months? You don't know, and usually you can't find out.

TinyPixel works differently. We compile the image processing code to WebAssembly and ship it to your browser. Your device does the work. The file never transmits anywhere.

The technical baseline is intentionally conservative: Chrome 57, Firefox 52, Safari 11, or Edge 16 and up. That's roughly 2017-era browsers. If your device can run a modern webpage, it can probably run TinyPixel.

For the HEIC tools specifically, we use libheif-js compiled to WASM. The gzipped download is about 450 KB. Once it's cached, decoding a typical 12 megapixel iPhone photo takes around 120 milliseconds on a modest laptop. Older phones take longer, naturally, but the work's happening in your pocket, not round-tripping to a data center.

What's live right now

We started with HEIC because it's the most common "help, I can't open this" problem we saw. iPhones shoot HEIC by default, Windows doesn't always know what to do with it, and sending one to someone on Android can be a coin flip.

The four HEIC converters are live today:

• HEIC to JPG for maximum compatibility
• HEIC to PNG when you need transparency or lossless quality
• HEIC to WebP for smaller web-friendly files
• HEIC to PDF for documents, print workflows, or email attachments

Alongside those, we've got the everyday tools people actually need:

• Compress image to shrink file size
• Resize image for specific dimensions
• Crop image to cut out what you don't need
• Rotate image for orientation fixes
• Flip image for horizontal or vertical mirrors
• JPG to PNG and PNG to JPG for simple format switching

We might add more tools over time, but only when we can make them actually good and actually private. There's no value in shipping fifty half-baked converters that barely work.

What we're not doing

It's just as important to say what TinyPixel isn't.

We're not a RAW processor. If you're shooting Canon CR3 or Sony ARW files, you'll want something like Darktable or your camera manufacturer's software. RAW development needs color science we can't fit in a browser tab.

We're not doing OCR on long PDFs. A five-page scanned document with text extraction is a different problem than "convert this one photo." Maybe someday, but it'd need a different architecture.

No video tools. Video codecs are a licensing quagmire and the file sizes don't make sense for in-browser processing.

No AI image generation. No "describe a cat in a spacesuit" feature. The compute requirements don't fit our model, and the ethical landscape around training data is still a mess.

That said, we might offer a paid tier later for genuinely heavy workloads: batch processing hundreds of files, advanced color adjustments, things that honestly need server-side power. If we do, it'll operate with the same privacy posture: files uploaded for processing get auto-deleted the moment the job completes. We don't want your data any more than you want us to have it.

How this stays free

TinyPixel doesn't charge for anything right now. We don't have a credit card form, we don't have "credits," we don't watermark your outputs.

The site runs on ads.

We're also not selling usage data because we don't collect any. No analytics SDKs phoning home with your file names. No "engagement metrics" tracking how long you stared at a compression slider. The tools literally can't report what they don't know.

The privacy part, specifically

We wrote our privacy policy to be readable, but here's the short version: the only data that reaches our servers is what your browser sends for any webpage (IP address, user agent, that sort of thing). Your images, your file names, your settings: none of it transmits. We can't lose it in a breach because we never had it.

If you want to verify this yourself, open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and watch while you use a tool. You won't see an upload request. The only fetches are for the site's code and the WASM module itself.

What comes next

We're not promising a roadmap. What we will say is that we're using TinyPixel ourselves, and we'll keep improving the parts that frustrate us. Better progress indicators for large files. Smarter defaults on compression. Maybe a couple more format converters if there's clear demand.

If you've got a specific problem that none of the current tools solve, or if something's broken on your particular browser, get in touch. We read everything, even if we can't always reply immediately.

Try it

If you've got a .heic file sitting on your desktop that you can't open, try the converter. If you need to shrink a photo for a form that has a 2 MB upload limit, compress it. See how it feels when the processing happens on your own device instead of bouncing through someone else's computer.

Welcome to TinyPixel. We hope it saves you a little time and a little worry.