Video Tools9 min read
Compressing video for the web without guessing
Every export dialog offers a quality slider and tells you nothing about what it does. Four settings decide the file size, and understanding them replaces trial and error.
Section
Online Tools
Free browser tools for the small jobs — and when the file should never leave your machine.
5 articles
Online Tools8 min read
The browser can now do the work: tools that run on your device
Background removal, transcription, OCR and format conversion increasingly run inside the tab. That changes the privacy question for a whole category of free tools.
Image Tools8 min read
Screenshots and screen recordings, done properly
Your operating system already does most of what screenshot tools charge for. The parts worth knowing are the shortcuts nobody discovers and the metadata nobody removes.
Image Tools8 min read
WebP, AVIF and JPEG: which to use and when
Modern image formats are substantially smaller at the same quality, and choosing between them is simpler than the comparisons suggest. Three questions settle it.
Text Tools9 min read
Cleaning up messy text: the five operations that solve most of it
Text pasted from a PDF, an email or a spreadsheet arrives broken in a small number of recognisable ways. Each has a fix that takes seconds once you can name the problem.