about keepfileslocal

Almost every free file tool on the web is a website in front of a server. You upload, it processes, you download. That arrangement has to be paid for — every megabyte costs bandwidth and every conversion costs processor time — which is why those sites cap the file size, queue free users, watermark the output, or ask you to sign up.

Browsers have been able to do this work for years. Decoding an image, re-encoding it, reading the structure of a PDF: all of it runs perfectly well on the machine that already has the file. Doing it there removes the cost, and removing the cost removes the limits. There is no size cap here because a large file costs us nothing.

It also removes a risk you did not choose to take. A file that never leaves your device cannot be retained, breached, subpoenaed or sold, and no policy has to be trusted for that to be true.

Your device does the work, so a very large job is limited by your memory rather than by our patience — and a phone will give up on a file a desktop would manage. When that happens the tool says so instead of quietly sending the file somewhere bigger.

Some things are also simply harder in a browser. HEIC photographs from an iPhone only decode in Safari, because the decoder belongs to the operating system, so this site says that plainly rather than pretending. Anything that needs a large piece of downloaded machinery — video, text recognition — is a deliberate decision we have not made yet.

A tool that gets the wrong answer is worth more to us than a compliment. Write to hello@keepfileslocal.com with what you did, what you expected and what happened. Do not send the file itself — it will not help, and the whole point of this site is that we never see it.