About PixFoundry

Last updated: 15 October 2026

PixFoundry is a collection of free image tools: format conversion (including iPhone HEIC), compression to a target size, resizing for social media, cropping, and EXIF metadata removal. What makes it different is where the work happens: everything runs inside your web browser, on your own device.

Why build it this way?

Most online image converters upload your photos to a server, process them there and send them back. That has real downsides. Your private photos, documents and ID scans end up on a computer you know nothing about. Uploads are slow on mobile connections. And because servers cost money, these sites limit how many files you can convert per day or push you towards a paid plan.

Modern browsers are powerful enough to do this work locally. With WebAssembly, the same high-quality image codecs that power professional software can run in a browser tab at near-native speed. PixFoundry takes advantage of that: there is no upload step, nothing to wait for in a queue, and no reason to limit how much you use it.

How it works

When you open a tool, only the page itself loads. When you add your first image, the page loads the codecs it needs and starts background workers, separate threads that keep the page responsive while they work. Each image is decoded, processed and re-encoded in memory on your device. When you download a result, it is handed to you directly from your browser’s memory.

Because of this design, PixFoundry also works offline once a tool page has loaded, and it can be as fast as your device allows.

Open-source software

PixFoundry is built on excellent open-source projects. We are grateful to their authors:

• libheif and libde265 (LGPL-3.0) for HEIC and HEIF decoding, via libheif-js
• MozJPEG (IJG, BSD-3-Clause and zlib) for JPEG encoding and decoding
• libwebp (BSD-3-Clause) for WebP encoding and decoding
• libavif, libaom and dav1d (BSD-2-Clause) for AVIF
• oxipng and the Squoosh PNG codec (MIT) for PNG
• Squoosh resize (MIT) for high-quality Lanczos resampling
• jSquash (Apache-2.0), which packages the Squoosh codecs for the browser
• fflate (MIT) for creating ZIP files
• MI-GAN (MIT, Picsart AI Research) for AI inpainting in the date stamp remover (fine-tuned by us on camera stamps), run with ONNX Runtime Web (MIT)
• PP-OCRv5 text detection and PP-OCRv6 text recognition (Apache-2.0, PaddleOCR; ONNX conversion by RapidOCR) for finding the text in the date stamp remover and reading it in Image to Excel and Image to Text, run with ONNX Runtime Web
• OpenCC character tables (Apache-2.0) for keeping simplified and traditional Chinese apart in Image to Excel and Image to Text
• U²-Netp (Apache-2.0, Xuebin Qin et al.) for automatic subject detection in the background remover, run with ONNX Runtime Web
• Astro, Preact and Tailwind CSS (MIT: Astro, Preact, Tailwind CSS) for the website itself

libheif is loaded as a separate, dynamically loaded module, in accordance with its LGPL licence; its source code is available from the libheif and libheif-js projects. The LGPL-3.0 builds on the GNU GPL v3.

Funding

The tools are free. To cover the cost of running and improving the site, we may show a small number of advertisements. Ads never have access to your files, which stay on your device.

Contact

Found a bug, a file that does not convert, or have an idea for a new tool? Email contact@mechanicalfoundryshop.com. We cannot offer individual support, but every report is read and helps improve the tools.