Almost every image problem is small. A photo is 6 MB and needs to be under 500 KB. A logo arrived as a PNG and needs to be an SVG. A screenshot has text in it that you'd rather not retype. A product shot has a white background that needs to be transparent. None of these are hard jobs — but the usual path to solving them is installing something, signing up for something, or uploading a file you'd rather not hand over to a stranger's server just to shave a few hundred kilobytes off it.
The image tools on FWD Tools are sixteen free, browser-based tools for exactly those small jobs — editing, compressing, converting, tracing, extracting, and generating. The important part is what happens to your file: nothing is uploaded. Every one of these reads your image locally — from the file picker, a drag-and-drop, or a paste — does the work on a canvas in the tab you're looking at, and hands you back a download. No account, no queue, no size cap set by someone's hosting bill.
Who these are for
- Anyone with a photo that's too big to send or too slow to load — the most common image problem there is, and a thirty-second fix.
- Developers preparing assets: favicons in every size a browser asks for, images inlined as Base64, PNG logos traced to SVG, screenshots turned into something presentable for a README.
- Anyone handling images they'd rather not upload — client work under NDA, ID documents, medical scans, internal screenshots, anything with a face or an address in it.
- People who need one thing done, once, and don't want a subscription, a desktop install, or a watermark on the way out.
The everyday fixes: resize, crop, compress
Image Editor is the general-purpose one, with six tabs covering the jobs that come up most: resize (with ten presets from Instagram Post and Twitter/X Post to LinkedIn Banner, YouTube Thumbnail, OG Image and favicon sizes, plus an aspect-ratio lock), crop with a draggable overlay and fixed ratios (1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 3:2, 9:16, 3:4, or free), rotate and flip, compress with a quality slider and format choice, a text tool for adding captions or watermarks at any size, color and opacity, and a background-color fill for when a transparent PNG needs to become a solid JPEG. It's the tool to open when you're not sure which single-purpose tool you need.
Image Compressor is the one to open when you know exactly what you need: smaller files, in bulk. Drop in a whole folder's worth, pick a target format — WebP (typically 30–70% smaller than JPEG or PNG), AVIF (30–50% smaller again, supported in Chrome, Firefox and Safari 16+), JPEG, PNG, or keep the original — set a quality level, and download them one at a time or all at once. Two details make it more useful than a plain quality slider. First, PNG compression here isn't just re-encoding: it uses palette quantization, where the quality setting controls how many colors survive, which is the same technique that makes TinyPNG's results so much smaller than a naive re-save. Second, resizing is built into the same pass, with five modes (scale by percentage, cap the width, cap the height, fit inside a box, or leave it) and presets for OG images, Instagram, Twitter headers, LinkedIn covers, favicons and Full HD — because most oversized images are oversized in dimensions, not just in bytes. A split before/after preview lets you drag a divider across the image to check what the compression actually cost you.
Changing what's in the picture
Image Background Remover takes the background out and gives you a transparent PNG. It works by color rather than by AI segmentation, which is worth knowing because it tells you exactly when it will do a great job and when it won't: product shots, logos, screenshots, headshots on a plain backdrop — anything with a reasonably uniform background — come out clean. There are four modes: white or light backgrounds (the default), a magic wand where you click the areas to drop, a specific picked color, and auto-detection from the image's edges. A tolerance slider controls how aggressive the match is, and a feather slider softens the cut edge so the result doesn't look stamped out with scissors. You can preview the result against a checkerboard, white, black, or any custom color before exporting, and wand clicks have undo and redo, so an over-eager click costs nothing.
Relight Photo is the unusual one: it adds light sources to a photo after the fact. You drag lights around the image, each with its own color, intensity and radius, and adjust global ambient level and shadow depth. Five presets cover the common looks — Studio (a warm key with a cool fill), Product (bright top light plus a rim), Neon (pink and cyan from opposite sides), Sunset (an orange sun high on one side with a cool blue bounce on the other) and Dramatic (a single hard spot) — and you can add, move or delete lights from there. A compare slider shows the original underneath. It won't rebuild a badly-lit photo from nothing, but it will rescue a flat product shot in about a minute.
Converting between formats
- Image to SVG — Traces a raster image into real vector paths, so a logo that only exists as a PNG becomes something that scales cleanly to a billboard. Four presets set sensible starting points (Logo: 8 colors, smoothed; Icon: 4 colors, very smooth; Sketch: black and white with sharp lines; Illustration: 24 colors, detailed), and from there you control color mode, color count, smoothing, the minimum path size to keep, corner snapping and source blur. Post-trace effects — blur, sharpen, drop shadow — apply without re-tracing, and a split view compares the traced vector against the original.
- SVG to PNG — The reverse trip, for when something won't accept an SVG (email clients, older CMSes, app store assets, most social platforms). Upload a file or paste the SVG markup directly, then export at 1×, 2×, 3× or 4× the native size, or type exact pixel dimensions with an aspect-ratio lock. Background can stay transparent or be set to any color.
- Image to Base64 — Turns an image into a string you can paste straight into code, which removes one HTTP request and one more file to deploy. It gives you six output shapes rather than one: a raw data URI, a ready-to-paste HTML
<img>tag, a CSSbackground-imagerule, a CSScontent: url()rule, the raw Base64 string on its own, and URL-encoded SVG (which is smaller than Base64 for SVGs and stays readable). You can also convert to JPEG, PNG or WebP with a quality setting on the way through, which matters because Base64 adds roughly a third to whatever you feed it — inlining an uncompressed PNG is how a page ends up with a stylesheet heavier than the images it replaced. - PDF to Images and Images to PDF — The two-way bridge between documents and pictures. PDF to Images renders page thumbnails so you can pick exactly which pages you want (individually or as a range like
2-7), then exports them as PNG or JPEG at your chosen scale. Images to PDF goes the other way, with page size (auto-fit to each image, A4, and others), orientation, fit mode, margin and quality controls.
Pulling text and color out of an image
Image to Text (OCR) reads the text in a picture and hands it back as text you can copy. Useful for a screenshot of an error message, a scanned page, a photo of a whiteboard, a receipt, or a slide from a deck nobody shared the source of. Sixteen languages are supported, including Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi and Russian. The result comes with a confidence percentage — green at 80% and above, amber down to 55%, red below that — and lands in an editable box with a live word count, so you can clean up the inevitable stray characters before copying or downloading it as a .txt file.
Image Color Palette extracts the dominant colors from any image. Drop in a photo, a screenshot of a brand you like, or a piece of artwork, and it returns a palette — anywhere from 4 to 150 swatches on a slider — in HEX, RGB or HSL. Click any swatch to copy it. This is the fastest way to build a color scheme from a mood board, or to answer "what blue is that, exactly?" without opening a design app.
Generating the images a site actually needs
- Favicon Generator — One image in, a complete set out: eight PNG sizes (16, 32, 48, 64, 96, the 180px apple-touch-icon, and the 192 and 512 Android Chrome icons), a real multi-resolution
favicon.ico, asite.webmanifest, and the<link>tags to paste into your<head>. You can pad the source, round its corners or clip it to a circle, set a background color or keep it transparent, and download the whole set as a zip. This is the classic job that takes fifteen minutes by hand and thirty seconds here. - OG Image Generator — The 1200×630 card that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slack pull when someone pastes your link. Five templates, custom colors and fonts, logo upload, PNG out. A link with no image gets scrolled past; this is the cheapest fix for click-through there is.
- QR Code Generator — Seven code types, not just URLs: plain text, WiFi credentials (network, password, encryption type, hidden networks), email, SMS, phone number, and a full vCard contact. Then the styling most generators charge for — six dot styles, separate corner-square and corner-dot shapes, a two-color linear or radial gradient, a logo dropped into the middle, and four error-correction levels so a code with a logo over its center still scans.
- Code Screenshot Generator — Turns a block of code into the kind of image people post in READMEs, docs and threads. Nine themes (One Dark, Dracula, GitHub Dark and Light, Monokai, Nord, Tokyo Night, Solarized Dark, Night Owl), syntax highlighting for 23 languages, four window styles (macOS, Windows, Terminal, or none), gradient or solid backgrounds, optional line numbers, adjustable padding and export scale. Copy straight to the clipboard or download a PNG.
- Animated SVG Icons — 117 icons across eight categories (Actions, Navigation, Social, Notification, UI, Media, Dev, Creative), each animating the SVG itself, with the markup ready to copy. Useful when a static icon set leaves an interface feeling inert.
Questions these answer in a few minutes
- "This image is too big to email / too slow to load." Image Compressor — convert to WebP and cap the width in the same pass.
- "I need this logo as an SVG and only have a PNG." Image to SVG, starting from the Logo or Icon preset.
- "I need this product shot with a transparent background." Background Remover, white mode, then nudge the tolerance.
- "I need to retype the text in this screenshot." You don't — Image to Text will read it.
- "What are the brand colors in this image?" Image Color Palette, then click to copy the hex.
- "My site's tab icon is still the default." Favicon Generator — every size plus the manifest and the HTML, in one download.
- "I need a WiFi QR code for the office wall." QR Code Generator, WiFi type, done.
- "I want to share this code snippet as an image." Code Screenshot Generator.
A sensible order to do this in
- Fix the content first. Crop, straighten, remove the background, relight — anything that changes what's in the frame belongs before compression, since re-compressing an already-compressed JPEG throws away quality twice.
- Resize before you compress. A 4000px-wide photo displayed in an 800px column is wasting most of its bytes on pixels nobody sees. Cap the dimensions, then set quality.
- Pick the format for the job. WebP for almost everything on the web, AVIF when you can afford to check browser support, PNG only when you need transparency or crisp flat color, SVG when it's a logo or an icon.
- Check the before/after. Both the compressor and the tracer have split-preview sliders. Use them — quality 60 looks fine on some images and visibly wrong on others, and there's no universal number.
- Generate the derived assets last, once the source image is final: favicons, OG cards, and Base64 strings all bake in whatever you gave them.
Frequently asked questions
Are my images uploaded anywhere?
No. Every tool here reads your file locally and processes it on a canvas inside your browser tab — there's no server-side upload step, which is why there's no upload wait, no server-imposed file-size cap, and no problem working on a flaky connection. One nuance worth stating plainly: the OCR tool downloads its recognition engine and the language data for whichever language you pick the first time you run it. That's the software coming down to your machine, not your image going up.
Are they really free? Is there a watermark or a file limit?
Free, no account, no watermark, no per-file or per-day limit. The only practical ceiling is your own device's memory on very large batches.
Which format should I use for photos on a website?
WebP is the sensible default — broadly supported and typically 30–70% smaller than the JPEG or PNG equivalent. AVIF is smaller again and worth using if your audience is on current browsers. Keep PNG for images that need transparency or hard-edged flat color, and use SVG for anything that's really a drawing rather than a photograph.
Why does the background remover struggle with my photo?
It separates background from subject by color similarity, not by recognizing what a person or a product is. That makes it fast, private and predictable on plain or near-plain backgrounds — and unreliable on busy ones, or when the subject is a similar color to what's behind it. If the default white mode misses areas, switch to the magic wand and click the specific regions, then raise the tolerance a little at a time.
Can I convert several images at once?
The Image Compressor is the batch tool — drop in as many files as you like, apply one set of settings to all of them, and use "Download All" when they're done. Images to PDF also takes a batch, since combining them is the whole point. The rest are single-image tools by design.
Is the traced SVG as good as one drawn by a designer?
No, and it isn't trying to be. Tracing approximates shapes with paths, so a hand-drawn logo will gain some nodes and lose some precision. For simple, flat, high-contrast artwork — most logos and icons — the result is genuinely usable, especially from the Logo or Icon preset. For a detailed photograph, expect an interesting stylized result rather than a faithful vector.
Can I use the output commercially?
Yes — everything you produce is yours, free for commercial use, with no attribution required. The tools don't claim any rights over what you put through them, and since nothing is uploaded, there's no copy of your work on anyone's server to claim rights over.
Do these work on a phone?
Yes. They run in a mobile browser, and the file picker gives you your camera roll. The heavier ones — OCR, SVG tracing, and large batch compressions — will be slower on a phone than a laptop, since the work is genuinely happening on your device.
Small jobs, done in the tab you're already in
None of this is complicated work. It's the accumulation of small friction — the install, the sign-up, the upload, the wait, the watermark — that turns a thirty-second job into a ten-minute one. Start with the Image Compressor if you have a file that's too big, the Image Editor if you're not sure what you need yet, or the Favicon Generator if your site's tab still shows a blank page icon.
Browse the full set at FWD Tools Image Tools, or the wider collection of free browser-based tools — all free, all local, none of them asking you to sign up.
