Built by someone who didn't trust the other guys.

Every other file converter wants you to upload your files to their server. Your photos, your documents, your videos — sitting on some stranger's machine while it "processes." Most of the time it's fine. Sometimes it isn't. Either way, you have no idea what happens to your files after you click download.

Filesmith was built to fix that. Everything runs directly in your browser — conversion, compression, editing, all of it. Your files never travel anywhere. They don't touch a server. The moment you close the tab, they're gone. I couldn't access them if I wanted to, because there's nowhere for them to go.

It started as a personal tool. I needed to strip location data out of photos before posting them and didn't want to hand the originals to a website to do it. That turned into the EXIF stripper, which turned into the face blur tool, which turned into the rest of this.

How the numbers on this site are worked out

Most converter sites tell you a conversion will make your file "up to 90% smaller." That number is usually invented. The figures on Filesmith aren't — every one comes from running the conversion on a real file and reading the bytes.

That's why the PNG to JPG page says 2,327 KB down to 452 KB on a specific photo rather than a vague range, and why it names the photo's dimensions and what kind of image it was. If you converted something different you'd get a different number, and the page says so.

It also means some pages tell you the conversion is a bad idea. Converting WebP to PNG made a test file nearly twelve times larger, so that page says so up front instead of pretending otherwise. Four of the converters here warn you that your file will grow.

Where my measurements disagreed with the received wisdom, I published mine. HEIC is widely described as half the size of JPG; measured properly — matched on image quality rather than on a slider position — the gap on my test photo was closer to a third. The page explains the difference rather than repeating the more flattering figure.

What's here

Converters — 33 of them, covering images, audio, video, documents and audio-to-MIDI. Each one has its own page explaining what the format actually is, what the conversion costs you, and when not to bother.

Image editor — layers, masks, blend modes, filters and PSD support. A real editor, running in a browser tab.

Privacy tools — EXIF stripper for the location data hidden in your photos, and face blur for the people in them who didn't agree to be posted.

Odds and ends — a GIF maker, a QR code generator and reader, and a unit converter that exists mostly because I got tired of searching for one.

What it can't do

Running everything locally has a cost, and it's worth being straight about it. Very large video files can exhaust what a browser tab is allowed to use, and a phone will give up sooner than a desktop. Some conversions are slower than a server would be, because the work is happening on your machine rather than on a rack somewhere.

There's no account, so there's no history, no cloud storage, and nothing waiting for you when you come back. Close the tab and it's genuinely gone. That's the trade — and for the files most people convert, it's the right one.