About Pico Image

What This Site Is

Pico Image is a collection of free image tools you use in a web browser. There are 39 of them, plus 12 dedicated format-conversion pages and 9 size-preset pages, covering compression, resizing, cropping, format conversion, background removal, watermarking, face blurring and a layered editor — along with a long tail of very specific jobs, like changing a PNG’s DPI without re-encoding it or getting a scanned document under 50 KB. The site has been running since January 2026 and is available in ten languages. There is no account to create, no trial, no watermark on the output, and nothing to buy.

Everything Runs on Your Device

One decision shapes the whole site: your image never leaves your browser. Files are decoded onto a canvas on your own computer or phone and processed there, by JavaScript and by libraries compiled to WebAssembly. This is not a policy we promise to keep — it is how the code is built.

• Compression uses browser-image-compression, with imagequant and oxipng compiled to WebAssembly for reducing a PNG’s palette to the colours it actually uses.
• Background removal runs a segmentation model in your browser through @imgly/background-removal. The model is downloaded to your device and run there — the first run is slow because of that download, and subsequent runs are not.
• HEIC photos from iPhones are decoded locally by heic-to, so a format your desktop software may refuse to open becomes a JPEG without a round trip to anyone’s server.
• The layered editor is built on Fabric.js and does its filtering, masking and compositing on a canvas in your tab.
• The honest trade-off: because the work happens on your device, very large files are limited by that device’s memory, and a few operations are slower on an old phone than a server would be. In exchange there is no upload to wait through, the tools work on a bad connection, and no copy of your photo exists anywhere but with you.

How the Tools Are Checked

A tool that quietly produces a broken file is worse than one that refuses to run. Each tool is checked against the bytes it actually writes, rather than against whether the preview looked right. A few examples of what that means in practice:

• The DPI tool inserts a pHYs chunk directly after the PNG header and leaves the pixel data alone: the compressed image stream is byte-for-byte identical to the input and the file grows by exactly 21 bytes. It also rewrites the Exif resolution tags, because macOS, Windows, Photoshop and Lightroom all read Exif in preference to the JFIF header — a tool that wrote only JFIF would appear to do nothing at all to a camera photo.
• Converters are verified by file signature rather than by extension. PNG output has to begin with 89 50 4E 47, JPEG with FF D8, WebP with a RIFF header. Naming a file .png is not evidence that it is one.
• BMP to JPEG was checked against a hand-built 24-bit BMP, so the decoded pixel values could be compared exactly rather than eyeballed.
• ICO to PNG was tested with a source file containing both a 16×16 and a 32×32 image, to confirm the page’s claim that it exports a single size is true.

What We Decided Not to Build

The catalogue is shorter than it could be. Several obvious, well-searched pages are missing on purpose, because they could not be built honestly. Since that is the sort of thing a site usually keeps quiet about, here it is:

• JPG to AVIF does not exist here because no browser can encode AVIF. Chrome’s canvas.toBlob("image/avif") returns a PNG. Shipping the page would hand people files named .avif that contain PNG data — a fake that would only surface later, somewhere less convenient.
• There is no "resize to 20 KB without losing quality" page. That phrase is a search query, not an operation that exists; a page published under that promise would be a lie the tool cannot keep.
• There are no 5 KB or 10 KB size targets. Below roughly 15 KB a photograph of a face has to drop under about 200 pixels on its long side, and the tool’s 96-pixel floor starts refusing the request outright. A page that mostly answers "no" is not worth publishing.
• SVG to PNG is held back until output dimensions can be chosen. An SVG with no width and height attributes decodes at a default 150×150, which would silently turn a vector logo into a thumbnail.

Ten Languages, Not Ten Machine Translations

The site exists in English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. That covers not only the buttons but every tool’s explanation and FAQ — the several hundred words on each page describing what the tool does, what it cannot do, and what happens to transparency, metadata and quality along the way. Translations are checked for machine-translation artefacts before they ship: mixed-language titles and half-translated compound words have been found and fixed that way more than once.

How the Site Is Paid For

Advertising, and nothing else. There is no paid tier, no credit pack and no upsell, because there is nothing here to sell you. Ads are served by Google AdSense, and they are the reason the tools can stay free and unlimited. What is explicitly not part of the model is your content: your images never reach our servers, so there is nothing for us to sell, mine or train on. The Privacy Policy sets out precisely what is collected, by whom, and how to refuse it.

Who Runs It

Pico Image is built and run by one person, independently — it is not a company with a support department, and it is more useful to say so than to imply otherwise. In practice that means bug reports sent by email are usually read within a few days and fixed quickly when they are reproducible, but there is no round-the-clock helpdesk behind the address. If a tool gives you a wrong result, telling us which file and which browser is genuinely the fastest way to get it fixed.