Do online image converters upload your photos?

Most do. The file is sent to a server, converted there, and the result is sent back. The site then tells you the file is deleted after a period, which you have no way to verify. Image Converter Hub converts inside your browser instead, so no upload happens at all.

How can I tell whether a converter uploads my images?

Load the page, then disconnect from the internet and try to convert something. A converter that uploads will fail. One that runs in your browser will keep working.

Is a browser-based image converter slower?

Usually the opposite. There is no upload and no download, so for anything but a very large file the conversion finishes sooner — the work is limited only by your own processor.

Does it still work if I have no internet at all?

Yes, once the page has loaded once. The converter is cached on your device, so it opens and runs with no connection.

Turn off your internet. It still works.

Every online converter says your photos are safe. Ours is the one you can check. Load this page, disconnect from the network, and convert an image anyway — a tool that uploads your files cannot do that.

The problem with “we delete your files”

Type “image converter” into Google and nearly every result works the same way. You choose a photo. Your browser uploads it to a server somewhere. The server converts it and sends the result back. Underneath the upload button there is a reassuring line: files are deleted after an hour, or a day, or two hours.

That promise may well be kept. The trouble is that you cannot tell either way. Once a file has left your device, everything that happens next is invisible to you — who administers the server, where it is, what is backed up, what a subpoena would reach, what an intrusion would expose. You are not choosing between safe and unsafe. You are choosing how much to trust a stranger with a photo of your passport, your child, or your medical scan.

The only honest fix is not a better promise. It is not uploading the file.

How this converter actually works

You pick a file

Your browser hands the converter a reference to the file on your own disk. This is the same mechanism that lets you attach a photo to an email — the page can read it, nothing has been sent.

Your device decodes it

The image is decoded by your browser’s own image engine, into memory on your machine. For HEIC, a decoder runs on your device too — downloaded once, then reused from cache.

Your device re-encodes it

The decoded pixels are written back out in the format you chose, using your processor. This is the step other sites pay for server capacity to do.

You save the result

The finished file is handed straight to your downloads folder from memory. At no point in these four steps does your image cross the network.

Prove it in ten seconds.

1. Wait for this page to finish loading. 2. Turn off wi-fi, or switch on aeroplane mode. 3. Convert an image below.

It works — and a green bar appears at the bottom of the screen confirming you are offline. Any converter that uploads would fail at step 3.

Try it right here

The converter below is the same one used everywhere on this site. Drop a file in, then disconnect and drop in another.

The harder proof, for anyone who wants it

If “turn off the wi-fi” is not enough for you, good — here is the version that leaves no room for argument. Press F12 to open your browser’s developer tools, choose the Network tab, and convert an image. You will see requests for the page itself, the stylesheet, the scripts and the advertising. You will not see your image going anywhere, because there is no request that carries it.

Two things you will see, and we would rather say so plainly than have you find them and wonder what else was left out:

Advertising and analytics. Google AdSense and Google Analytics load on this site — that is what keeps it free. They receive the ordinary things any site’s ad network receives: a page address, a rough location, a browser fingerprint. They never receive your images, because your images never enter the network layer at all. Full detail is in the privacy policy.
A conversion counter. When a batch finishes, the page sends a single number — how many files were converted and their total size — so the running total on the homepage is real rather than invented. No filenames, no image data, nothing that could identify a file or a person.

That is the complete list. Everything else stays on your machine.

What this means for the awkward files

Most conversions are holiday photos and nobody minds much. The ones that matter are the others: the scan of a passport for a visa application, a photo of a bank statement for an insurance claim, an X-ray a specialist asked you to email, a screenshot with a contract in it. Those are exactly the files people paste into the first converter Google offers, because the deadline is now and the alternative is installing software.

For those files the question is not whether a company is trustworthy. It is whether the file needs to leave your laptop at all. Here, it does not.

Common questions

Is it slower than a server-based converter?

Usually it is faster. A server converter has to upload your file and download the result; both of those take longer than the conversion itself for anything but a very large image. Here there is no transfer at all, and you can raise the speed setting to use more of your processor. See batch converting images for how that behaves across a few hundred files.

What is the file size limit?

Your device’s memory, rather than an upload cap. Very large images are scaled to fit within what the browser can hold, and you are told when that happens instead of quietly receiving something smaller than you expected.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes, including iPhone — which is where most HEIC files come from in the first place. See the guide on converting HEIC to JPG on iPhone.

Does anything get stored in my browser?

Your speed preference, and a cached copy of the converter itself so it opens offline. No images are stored — once a converted file is saved and the tab is closed, it is gone from the page entirely.

Start converting

Pick a format and go — HEIC to JPG, HEIC to PNG, WebP to PNG, PNG to JPG, JPG to WebP or AVIF to JPG. Every one of them runs on your device, and every one of them passes the same test.