Images by Edmund vs online converters
The converter sites do the job, and for one file they do it fine. Here’s honestly where a Mac app is better, and where a website is the right answer.
A converter website works by taking your picture off your Mac, sending it to a computer belonging to somebody you’ve never met, doing the work there and sending the result back. For a screenshot of a bus timetable that’s fine. For a client’s unreleased logo or a photo of your kids it’s a strange thing to have done without thinking about it, and it’s the reason I wrote a Mac app rather than a website. Two fair caveats before the table, though. Not all of them upload: a few, Squoosh being the well-known one, do the whole job inside your browser and the picture never leaves your machine. And a website runs on anything, including the work laptop you’re not allowed to install software on. Mine doesn’t.
The same job, two ways.
Neither one’s wrong. It depends on you.
- You’re not on your own Mac. They run on Windows, on a Chromebook, on a phone, and on the work laptop you can’t install anything on. This is a Mac app and always will be.
- It’s one file, once, and you’re already in the browser. Nothing to download beats anything to download.
- You need something turned into something I don’t do. Between them those sites will convert a video, a font or something odd out of a 3D tool, and I only do pictures.
- It’s a folder of them rather than one, and you want the same treatment on all of them.
- The picture belongs to a client or to your family, and you’d rather it didn’t go and sit on somebody else’s server.
- You do this often enough that upload, wait, download has started to grate.
Nine jobs, one window, on your own Mac.
Images by Edmund is free. Nothing locked, no adverts, and no account to make. The buttons below say where it has got to.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.
Online converters are hundreds of different sites run by hundreds of different people, so read the right-hand column as the shape of the thing rather than a claim about any one of them. What a given site does with your file, how big a file it accepts and what it charges are all theirs to change, and the honest ones tell you in their own privacy policy. Read it, whichever one you end up using.