**Free online photo tools — nothing is uploaded — App-Vault** > Ten free online tools that strip photo metadata, redact faces, resize, compress, convert and build QR codes — all inside the browser tab, with no file uploaded. Source: https://appvau.lt/tools/ # Ten tools for photographs. None of them can see your photographs. Every one of these runs on the file in your browser tab. There is no upload endpoint on this domain to send an image to, no queue, no temporary bucket, and no thirty-day retention policy to read. Disconnect the network after the page has loaded and they all still work, which is the only version of this promise that can be checked rather than believed. INDEX / 10 ENTRIES *Every tool, what it accepts and what it produces* | Tool | Takes | Returns | What it is for | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Photo privacy — What a picture says about you that you did not write into it, and how to take it back out. | | | | | [Photo metadata viewer and remover](https://appvau.lt/tools/photo-metadata/) | JPEG · PNG · WEBP | JPEG · PNG · WEBP | Shows every metadata field a photo carries, ranked by what it gives away, then rebuilds the file without any of it. The image data is copied byte for byte, so nothing is re-compressed. | | [Photo redactor: blur, pixelate, black bars](https://appvau.lt/tools/face-blur/) | JPEG · PNG · WEBP · AVIF · GIF | JPEG · PNG · WEBP | Drag over the parts of a picture that should not be published. The covering is written into the pixels and the file is re-encoded from them, so there is no layer to peel off and nothing underneath. | | Image files — Size, dimensions, format and exposure. The output is measured, not estimated. | | | | | [Image compressor](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-compressor/) | JPEG · PNG · WEBP · AVIF · GIF | JPEG · WEBP · PNG | Set a quality, or set a ceiling and let the tool walk a published quality ladder until the encoded file fits. The receipt names the quality it used, so the result is reproducible. | | [Image resizer](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-resizer/) | JPEG · PNG · WEBP · AVIF · GIF | JPEG · PNG · WEBP | Six modes, one of which crops and says so. The tool downsamples in halving steps rather than one jump, which is the difference between a clean small photograph and a crunchy one. | | [Image brightener](https://appvau.lt/tools/image-brightener/) | JPEG · PNG · WEBP · AVIF | JPEG · PNG · WEBP | Three published tone curves rather than one slider labelled "auto". The shadow lift leaves highlights alone, which is what keeps a brightened photo from looking like a grey screen. | | [PNG to WebP converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/png-to-webp/) | PNG · JPEG · WEBP · AVIF · GIF | WEBP | Lossless WebP is typically 25-30% smaller than the same PNG with identical pixels. Lossy WebP keeps the alpha channel, which is the thing JPEG cannot do. | | [WebP to JPG converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-jpg/) | WEBP · PNG · AVIF · GIF · JPEG | JPEG | JPEG has no alpha channel, so transparency has to be flattened onto something. The tool detects whether the source actually has transparent pixels and only asks when it matters. | | [WebP to PNG converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/webp-to-png/) | WEBP · JPEG · AVIF · GIF · PNG | PNG | The safe direction: PNG is lossless, keeps transparency, and is read by everything. The file will usually be larger, and the tool says by how much. | | [Ultra HDR converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/hdr-image-converter/) | JPEG · PNG · WEBP · AVIF | JPEG | Produces one file that is an ordinary JPEG to every old viewer and a high-dynamic-range image to a current one. The container is verified byte by byte before it is offered. | | Codes — Encoding a short piece of information into something a camera can read. | | | | | [QR code generator](https://appvau.lt/tools/qr-code-generator/) | text you type | PNG · SVG | Static codes with no redirect, no account and no scan tracking. Both produced files are decoded again from their own pixels before either download unlocks. | ## Why a vault company ships an image compressor Because the same failure keeps arriving from the other direction. App-Vault exists so that the photographs on a phone that should not be in the camera roll are encrypted on the device instead. What that does not cover is the moment a photograph leaves — sent to a landlord, uploaded to a marketplace, attached to an insurance claim, posted to a forum — and at that moment the file usually carries a good deal more than the picture. A phone photograph normally stores the coordinates where the shutter fired, accurate to within a few metres, along with the exact second, the phone model and the time-zone offset. A photograph from a system camera can carry the body and lens serial numbers, which tie every image that camera has ever published to one purchase. A screenshot can carry the editing history of the tool that cropped it. A file from an image generator can carry a signed record saying which model produced it. None of that is visible in the picture, none of it is announced, and all of it travels. The usual advice — "strip the EXIF before you post" — is sound and almost nobody follows it, because following it means finding a tool, and the tools ask you to upload the photograph to a stranger's server in order to make it more private. That is the inversion these pages exist to remove. ## What "runs in the browser" means here, exactly The file is read with the `File` API, decoded by the browser's own image decoder, changed in a canvas or in a byte buffer, and encoded again by the browser's own encoder. All of that happens inside the tab. The modules under `/js/tools/` contain no `fetch`, no `XMLHttpRequest`, no `WebSocket` and no `sendBeacon`: there is no code in them that could transmit a file, which is a stronger statement than a policy about what we would choose to do with one. Two things do reach the network on these pages and it is worth naming both. The HTML, CSS, fonts and scripts are fetched from this origin when the page loads, like any web page. Microsoft Clarity, the session-replay tool used across this site, starts after the page is interactive and records anonymised interaction events — which button was pressed, not which file was opened. It never sees a file, because the file is never in a request. The [privacy policy](https://appvau.lt/privacy/) names it along with every other processor. The practical limit of the approach is that a browser is not a photo pipeline. Its JPEG encoder is not mozjpeg, and a command-line tool will beat it by ten or twenty per cent on file size at a matched quality. In exchange, nothing is queued, nothing is retained, and there is no account. For one photograph before it gets sent somewhere, that is the correct trade; for a library of forty thousand, it is not, and the honest answer is to use something else. ## What a browser can and cannot open Every tool here decides what a file is from its first bytes rather than from its name, because an extension is a claim made by whoever last renamed the file. JPEG, PNG and WebP can be both read and written. AVIF and GIF can be read and not written, so a tool that opens one of those will offer you a JPEG, PNG or WebP back. HEIC is the exception that catches people, because it is what an iPhone shoots by default. Safari decodes it; Chrome and Firefox do not, and no amount of JavaScript changes that. The practical route is to share or export the photo as JPEG from the Photos app first — or to open these pages in Safari, where it works. ## The results say what they measured Every tool ends on the same receipt: what went in, what came out, and the settings that got from one to the other. That is not decoration. A compressor that says "optimised!" has told you nothing; one that says *quality 0.75, 412 kB, 68% smaller, seven encodes tried* has told you enough to repeat the result or to disagree with it. Two tools go further and refuse to hand over a file they have not read back. [The QR generator](https://appvau.lt/tools/qr-code-generator/) decodes both the PNG and the SVG it has just produced, recomputes their error-correction codewords, and only then unlocks the downloads — because a QR symbol is opaque to the person making it, and a wrong one is discovered after it has been printed. [The Ultra HDR converter](https://appvau.lt/tools/hdr-image-converter/) re-parses its own output and checks that the container describes itself correctly before offering it. Where a claim can be checked on this side, it is checked; where it cannot — whether a particular camera will read a particular print, whether a particular screen has the headroom for a gain map — the page says so instead of implying otherwise. ## What they will not do Worth saying in one place, because a list of capabilities with nothing on the other side of it is an advertisement. There is no batch processing: each tool takes one file, which is what keeps the memory footprint small enough to work on a phone and keeps the receipt honest about what happened to your file. There is no account, no saved history and no gallery — nothing you open here is remembered between visits, which is the same property as "nothing is uploaded" seen from the other side. There is no HEIC support outside Safari, and no amount of JavaScript changes that. There is no AI upscaling, denoising or generative editing anywhere on this site: those tools invent plausible detail, which is fine for a wallpaper and disqualifying for anything used as evidence or identification. There is no invisible-watermark detection or removal, because SynthID-class watermarks live in the pixels rather than the metadata and no reader of these formats can see them. Nothing preserves animation — an animated GIF or WebP is read as its first frame. And the QR generator makes static codes only: no redirect, no counter, no editable destination. The same list is published as JSON at [tools.json](https://appvau.lt/api/v1/tools.json), in a `not_included` block, so an assistant asked "can this site do X" gets the negative answer as an answer rather than as silence. ## How to check that nothing is uploaded It takes about thirty seconds and it is worth doing on any tool making this claim, not just this one. Open the browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and load a file into any tool on this site. The page's own assets arrive when the page loads; after that, using the tool produces no request at all. Nothing appears when you choose a file, nothing appears when you press the button, and nothing appears when you download the result. The stronger version of the check is to turn the network off. Load the page, disconnect, and use the tool: everything still works, because there is nothing for it to reach. A tool that processes your file on a server cannot pass that test, and most of the "free online" ones in this category are doing exactly that — the upload is the product, and the file sits in somebody's bucket under a retention policy you did not read. The third check is the source. Every module is plain JavaScript served from this origin under `/js/tools/`, and none of them contains `fetch`, `XMLHttpRequest`, `WebSocket` or `sendBeacon`. There is no code that could transmit a file, which is a different kind of statement from a promise about what we would choose to do with one. ## Free, and free to build on There is no account, no sign-in, no watermark, no daily limit and no upsell inside any of these pages. The reference data behind them — the image-format matrix, the metadata field dictionary, the QR payload formats and capacity tables, the mail-attachment limits — is published as JSON at [the data API](https://appvau.lt/api/) under CC BY 4.0, so you can build the same checks into something of your own and link back rather than re-deriving them. The app is the other half. If a photograph is sensitive enough that you are stripping its metadata before sending it, it is probably sensitive enough not to sit in the camera roll in the first place — which is what [the vault](https://appvau.lt/photo-vault/) is for, and what [its encryption](https://appvau.lt/encryption/) is documented parameter by parameter rather than described as military-grade. GET STARTED ## Seal the vault. Free to download. The free tier holds one file. Premium removes the limit — Weekly from $3.99 or Yearly from $29.99 with a 7-day free trial. [Open App-Vault on iPhone](https://appvau.lt/download/) --- HTML version: https://appvau.lt/tools/ Structured data for this site: https://appvau.lt/api/v1/openapi.json · https://appvau.lt/llms.txt Free to quote and reuse with a link back to the source URL above (CC BY 4.0).