About Squishly Tools

Squishly Tools is a free, browser-based file toolbox built and maintained by Squishly Tools. It brings together the everyday file jobs people usually hand to "free online converter" sites, which includes compressing and converting images, building, merging and splitting PDFs, zipping and unzipping files, and converting audio and video, and does all of them without ever uploading your files.

Why we built it

Almost every free online converter works the same way: your file is uploaded to a server, processed there, and a download link is handed back. For a holiday snap that hardly matters. For a CV with your phone number, a scan of your ID, a signed contract, a bank statement or a medical letter, it means your document is now sitting on a computer you know nothing about, in a country you cannot identify, for a length of time you cannot verify.

We built Squishly Tools because those jobs simply do not need a server. A modern browser can decode and re-encode images, render PDFs, run a video encoder and compress archives on its own. So every tool here does its work on your device. Load a page, switch off your wifi, and the tool still works. That is not a marketing line; it is the easiest way to check the claim for yourself.

Meet the Squish family

The site is run by a family of very small, very round blobs who take file sizes extremely personally. From left to right:

• Lilac is the youngest and has never met a photo she did not want to make smaller. She keeps a picture of a 40 MB PNG on her wall as a warning.
• Sunny sits on folders until they behave. Nobody has asked him to. He just does.
• Squish is the one on the homepage. He hugs every file that arrives, gives it a gentle squeeze, and hands it back lighter. He has never uploaded anything in his life and is a little smug about it.
• Peachy handles the zips. She can fit a whole project folder into one tidy archive and still have room for a snack.
• Bluey waves at every visitor. He is also in charge of waving goodbye to your files when you close the tab, which takes no time at all because they were never anywhere else.

Between them they cover images, PDFs, video, audio and archives. None of them have ever seen a server, and they would like to keep it that way.

What you can do here

• Images. Compress and convert between WebP, AVIF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and ICO, resize to exact dimensions, crop with ratio locks, and add text watermarks. Batch processing is supported throughout.
• PDF. Turn images into a PDF, merge several PDFs into one, split or extract pages, convert pages to images, compress scan-heavy files, rotate pages permanently, and convert Word documents to PDF.
• Archives. Create and open ZIP files, and compress or decompress single files with gzip.
• Video and audio. Compress video to a smaller H.264 MP4 and convert audio between MP3, M4A, WAV and OGG using a real FFmpeg engine that runs in the browser.
• Utilities. Rename a whole folder of files in one pass with numbering and patterns.

Every tool has its own page with a guide explaining when to use it, which settings matter, and what to expect from the result. There is also a set of longer reference guides on image formats, PDF size, video compression, archive formats and file privacy.

How it works under the hood

There is no magic, only standard web technology used carefully:

• Image tools use the browser's Canvas API to decode, scale, draw and re-encode images. Encoding to JPG, PNG and WebP is done by the browser's own image encoders; AVIF and ICO output use small encoders that run as JavaScript.
• PDF tools use two open-source libraries: pdf-lib for building, merging, splitting and rotating documents, and Mozilla's PDF.js, the renderer built into Firefox, for turning pages into images and for compression.
• Word to PDF reads the .docx with the mammoth library and lays the content out into a PDF with pdf-lib. It handles text, headings and lists well and is honest on its page about the layouts it cannot reproduce.
• Video and audio run FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. The engine is about 32 MB, downloaded once on first use and then cached. It is slower than a native app, but your footage never leaves your device.
• ZIP uses JSZip, and gzip uses the browser's native CompressionStream and DecompressionStream APIs, the same engine it uses to decode compressed web pages.

All of these libraries are bundled with the site and loaded from the same place as the page. No file data is sent to any third-party service at any point.

What it does not do

Because everything runs on your device, the tools are bounded by your device's memory and processor. A two-hour 4K video or a thousand-page scanned book is a job for desktop software. Perfect reproduction of a complex Word layout needs Word itself; our converter is for the simple documents that make up most of what people need to convert. Password-protected PDFs and encrypted archives cannot be opened, because their contents are unreadable without the key. Where a tool has limits, its page says so plainly rather than promising a result it cannot deliver.

Free, and how that is paid for

The tools are free to use, with no watermarks, no account, no daily limits and no "premium" tier that unlocks the real features. The site is supported by advertising. Ads and the anonymous analytics we use to see which tools people find useful are described in the privacy policy and can be declined in the cookie settings; neither has any access to the files you process, which never exist anywhere except your own browser.

Friends of Squishly

We build and look after websites for a handful of businesses we like, and we are happy to point you their way. Sotran Dekorativ offers a curated selection of premium tropical furniture and décor, designed for elegance and durability. With hand-crafted solid wood pieces, they help you create a space that is uniquely yours.

If you need a South African recruiter, JB Consulting places PR, marketing and communications people with the companies that need them, without the agency run-around.

And one that is close to our hearts: the Cat Family Foundation rescues, sterilises and rehomes feral and abandoned cats. If Squish has ever saved you a few megabytes, consider sending them a few rand.

Who makes it

Squishly Tools is created and maintained by Squishly Tools, a small web studio. We use these tools ourselves every day for client work, which is a large part of why they exist. If a tool has a bug, if a conversion did not come out the way you expected, or if there is a file job you wish were here, get in touch. We read everything.