About Squishly Tools

Squishly Tools is a free, browser-based file toolbox built and maintained by Ikonik Digital. It brings together the everyday file jobs people usually hand to "free online converter" sites, which includes compressing and converting images, editing, merging and splitting PDFs, cleaning up spreadsheets and email lists, 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 small, squishy jelly cubes 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 mint one in the middle. 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, spreadsheets, video, audio and archives. Their lime-yellow cousins look after the homepage. 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, rotate and flip, add text watermarks, enhance dull photos, upscale small graphics, and adjust brightness and colour. Batch processing is supported throughout.
• Social media. Preview a post, ad or carousel as it will look on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, and make classic captioned memes.
• PDF. Edit a PDF by reordering, rotating and deleting pages, filling in forms, signing and adding page numbers. 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.
• Spreadsheets and data. Convert between Excel, CSV and JSON, remove duplicate lines, split and merge CSV files, keep or delete columns, repair garbled accents, and clean email lists.
• 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 and draw images. JPG, WebP and AVIF are encoded by the browser's own encoders. PNG compression uses UPNG.js with pako, which re-encodes losslessly or reduces the palette, because the browser's own PNG encoder cannot make a file smaller. GIF, BMP and ICO are written by small encoders in the page itself.
• Spreadsheet tools read and write Excel workbooks with SheetJS; CSV parsing, deduplication and encoding repair are plain JavaScript.
• PDF tools use two open-source libraries: pdf-lib for building, merging, splitting, rotating, signing and filling in 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.

Who makes it

Squishly Tools is created and maintained by Ikonik Digital, a small web studio in South Africa. The tools and guides are built and written by Jenna, Web designer, Ikonik Digital, and we use them ourselves every day for client work, which is a large part of why they exist. You can see what has changed recently in the changelog. 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.