A Free Image Editor That Never Uploads Your Photos

Most free online photo editors start the same way: upload your photo. For a holiday snapshot that may be fine. For a picture of your kids, your house, a contract or an ID, you’re handing a copy to a server you know nothing about.

So I built an image editor that never sees your photos.

How it works

Open a photo, or drop it on the page. It’s read and edited in your browser tab, on your own device, and saved straight back to your computer. Nothing goes to a server, nothing is stored, and Close and delete wipes it from the page.

What you can do

• Crop, straighten and turn. Free or fixed shapes: square, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9, 9:16, and 1.91:1 for link previews.
• Resize to a size you type, or to a common longest side such as 1080 or 1920 pixels.
• Adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, warmth, tint, fade, vignette and sharpness, with a tone curve, or start from one of 12 filters.
• Add text, arrows, lines, boxes, circles, pen and highlighter, and move them around until you save.
• Blur, pixelate or black out a face, a license plate or a name.
• Watermark with your own text or logo, in a corner or tiled over the whole image.
• Remove a date stamp, a spot, a wire or your own old watermark: paint over it and it’s filled in from the rest of the photo.
• See the hidden data: where a photo was taken, when, with which camera, and the serial number. Save it without any of that.

Formats

It opens JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, iPhone HEIC, TIFF, BMP, ICO, SVG and Photoshop PSD. It saves JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP and favicons. Below the editor, Convert many images turns a whole folder of HEIC photos into JPEGs, makes web-sized copies or puts your watermark on a set, and hands them back as one ZIP.

How it was built

The browser decodes the common formats itself. For the rest, the page brings its own readers: TIFF and PSD are read by code written for this editor, and HEIC by libheif, an open-source decoder compiled to WebAssembly, loaded only when a browser can’t read HEIC itself. AVIF is saved with the encoder from Google’s Squoosh project. The Remove tool fills an area with patches copied from the rest of the photo; how it removes a date stamp has its own post, along with HEIC to JPEG, removing a photo’s location and adding a watermark.

Every file reader is tested against broken and deliberately hostile files, the same way as our DICOM viewer: a damaged or booby-trapped file gets a clear message, not a frozen tab.

To see how the same editor fits inside a product of its own, look at Glint, a fictional photo app we built around it as a website example.

Key takeaways

• A browser can edit photos without uploading them; this editor does everything on your device.
• It covers the everyday jobs: crop, resize, color, text, watermark, hiding things and removing things.
• It opens the awkward formats too: HEIC from iPhones, TIFF, PSD.
• It shows the hidden data in a photo and saves it without.

Open the image editor →

Need photo uploads in your own app that resize and clean images before they leave the device? We’ll build it for you, and because we work with AI-assisted development, it costs far less than you might expect. Let’s talk.