Tooloat

About Tooloat

Tooloat is a set of file and data tools that run entirely in your browser. It exists because most free online converters upload your files to a server, which is slow, limited and a poor fit for anything private.

How it works

Your browser reads a file from disk into memory. Code running on your own processor or graphics card converts it, using the same kind of open source engines that desktop programs use, compiled to WebAssembly. The result is offered as an ordinary download.

There is no upload step because there is no server that receives files. That is also why there are no size limits, watermarks or daily quotas: nothing on the other end needs protecting.

The engines behind the tools

  • Images: MozJPEG, OxiPNG, libwebp and libavif through jSquash, libheif through heic-to, and imagetracerjs for vector tracing.
  • PDF: PDF.js for rendering and text, and pdf-lib for merging, splitting, watermarking, encrypting and signing.
  • Video and audio: Mediabunny on top of the browser WebCodecs API, and the RNNoise neural denoiser.
  • AI: ONNX Runtime Web with WebGPU or WebAssembly, running Real-ESRGAN and Nomos8kSC for upscaling, and BiRefNet, ViTMatte and MODNet for background removal.
  • Text recognition: Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, with language data hosted on this site.
  • Data and security: hash-wasm, the Web Crypto API, zxing-wasm, SheetJS, Papa Parse and CodeMirror.

Limits worth knowing

  • The video and audio tools need WebCodecs, which current Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox provide.
  • Very large files are limited by your device memory, most noticeably on phones.
  • RAR and 7z archives cannot be opened yet. ZIP, TAR and GZ can.
  • PDF to Word rebuilds text and tables, not the exact page layout. Scanned pages need the text recognition step first.
  • Redacted PDF pages are flattened to images so the hidden text is really gone, which means those pages are no longer searchable.
  • The AI tools download a model file the first time you use them.

Keyboard shortcuts

  • Ctrl or Cmd plus K, or the slash key, opens the tool search.
  • Escape closes dialogs and the mobile menu.

Open source notices

Tooloat is built on open source software and gratefully credits its authors. HEIC decoding uses libheif through heic-to, which is licensed under the LGPL. Mediabunny is licensed under the MPL 2.0. Tesseract, ONNX Runtime and the RNNoise build are Apache 2.0. The passphrase word list is the EFF long word list, licensed CC BY 3.0 US. Fonts are Instrument Sans and JetBrains Mono under the SIL Open Font License.