Changelog

recent updates to pngtoolskit.org

22 September 2026 — accounts, workflows, and the popup is gone

• The modal popup is gone. Since 1 September a dialog had been opening over the page five seconds after load, on every page, asking for an email address. It should never have shipped: it covered the tool you came for, on a site whose entire premise is that you get the tool immediately, and it is the textbook example of the intrusive interstitial Google has treated as a mobile ranking signal since 2017. Removed everywhere.
• And so is the thing it was selling. The band above the footer offered "Pro — unlimited batch processing, no limits, saved presets" in exchange for your address. There is no Pro tier, batch was never limited, and asking for an email against a product that does not exist is not something this site should have been doing. It now offers the account below, which does exist and is free.
• Accounts — optional, free, and not a wall. Email and a password, no confirmation mail, working the moment you create it. It carries three things between your browsers: the tools you have starred, the presets you have saved, and the last fourteen tools you opened. Every one of the 165 tools works exactly as before without one, at full batch size, unmetered and unwatermarked. Signed out, the same three lists live in your browser's local storage, so the feature works with no account at all — an account only copies them to your other machines.
• Saved presets. Set a tool up the way you want it — WebP at 0.75, 1600px wide, sharpen on — name the combination, and it comes back in one click. On Compress, Resize and Watermark that is four or five fields you stop retyping.
• No reset emails, so you get a recovery code. Nothing on this box can send mail, and rather than pretend otherwise, signup hands you a one-time code. It is shown once, stored only as a hash, and it is the only way back in if you forget the password. Write it down.
• Twenty-eight workflows. Nobody wakes up wanting to crop something; they want a profile picture, and cropping is step two of four. Each of the 28 jobs is written as the order the steps go in with a line on why that order, because most image mistakes are ordering mistakes — compressing before resizing, trimming before keying out the background, cropping a scan before straightening it. Ninety-four tool pages now show the chains they belong to, which is also the first cross-category linking the site has had: the suggestions under a tool were same-category by construction, so Circle crop could never point at Compress however obviously they follow one another.
• A real 404 page. A mistyped URL used to return six bytes of plain text with no navigation and no way forward. It now renders the site, with the closest matching tools worked out from what you typed — /remove-bg offers Background, /jpg2png offers JPG to PNG, /redact offers Pixelate.
• Corrections. The privacy policy said there were no accounts and no cookies, which is no longer true, and listed libraries this site has never loaded — one of them, "jsPNG", does not exist. The terms warned that redaction here was cosmetic and "overlays do not remove the underlying text", which was left over from a PDF tool and is the opposite of what Pixelate does; they also referred to a merge tool and a lock/unlock tool that are not on this site. The contact page recommended Ghostscript and qpdf for compressing images. All rewritten. The tool count in the homepage description had also drifted — it said 164 while the catalogue held 165, so it is now counted rather than typed.

4 September 2026 — a smaller menu, a shorter footer, and a homepage that says what things do

• Every page used to link to every page. The megamenu carried all 164 tools, the footer carried them again, and the footer bar linked out to ten other sites — 352 links on a page with about 700 words of its own. A tool page now carries 39. The menu is the nine categories; the footer is those nine plus the site pages; the cross-site block is gone.
• Nothing got harder to find. The tool finder — press / — still reaches all 164 on the first keystroke, and it no longer needs the page to link to them to do it. Below every tool there are now six others from the same category, chosen half by hand and half by where you are in the list, so no two pages in a category suggest the same six.
• The homepage leads with what each tool does. It was 164 icons and labels in a grid. Each category now opens with its six most-wanted tools and a line each on what they actually do, with the rest one click away. Every tool page also gets a breadcrumb, so it is clear which of the nine groups you are standing in.
• Fixes. /lead-store had been answering with an empty 200 since the email form shipped on 1 September — a URL with nothing on it, which is exactly the kind of page a crawler is happy to index. It is a 404 now, along with the new /curated.

25 August 2026 — tone curves, and a compression loop you can actually see

• Tone curves. Curves is the manual version of every tonal slider on the site: drag control points over your own histogram and shape brightness, contrast, black point and colour independently. Master RGB plus separate red, green and blue channels, composited as channel[master[v]] so a pixel is still touched exactly once. The interpolation is a Fritsch–Carlson monotone cubic rather than a plain spline — a free spline overshoots between two close points, and past 255 that overshoot is a visible bright rim in a smooth gradient.
• Compression you can judge before you commit. Compress had a quality number box: type a value, run the whole batch, read the size delta, guess again. It is now a slider with a live readout of the real encoded byte count of the first file, next to a 1:1 crop of the original and the compressed result at up to 800%. The artefacts and the savings are both visible before anything is downloaded.
• The drop zones are keyboard-reachable. Every tool's drop zone was a div with a click handler — invisible to the keyboard and unnamed to a screen reader, so on 160 pages there was no way to add a file without a pointer. It is now a labelled role="button" with a tab stop, Enter/Space activation and a focus ring.
• Fixes. PNG to Base64 accepted several files and then silently encoded only the first; it now encodes them all, labels each block with its filename and offers the result as a download. Two Change aspect ratio links on PNG dimensions and orientation pointed at a URL that does not exist.

23 August 2026 — 25 more tools, and a usability pass over all of them (135 → 160)

• A real indexed-PNG encoder. PNG to 8-bit indexed writes a genuine palette PNG — colour type 3 with a PLTE chunk, one index per pixel, and 1, 2 or 4 bits per pixel when the palette is small enough. A browser canvas can only emit truecolour, so the palette is built with median-cut and the file assembled chunk by chunk with real Deflate via CompressionStream. On screenshots and flat illustration it takes 60–80% off, which is a saving ordinary re-compression cannot reach. Transparency survives as a single transparent palette index, GIF-style.
• Five new format converters. HEIC to PNG for iPhone photos — Safari decodes natively, everything else fetches libheif as WebAssembly, but only when a file actually needs it. PNG to ICNS builds a macOS app icon with the full 16-to-1024 ladder plus @2x entries, and the result round-trips through Apple's own iconutil. PNG to TGA writes 24- and 32-bit Targa with optional run-length encoding, PNG to PPM / PGM / PBM covers all six Netpbm variants in binary and ASCII, and braille art gets four times the detail of ASCII art out of Unicode's 2×4 dot cells.
• Three geometric warps. Perspective solves a real homography from four corner offsets, so parallel lines converge the way they do in a photograph — something a skew cannot do. Fisheye adds or corrects barrel distortion, and Swirl twists the frame with a choice of falloff curve. All three sample in destination space, which is what keeps a stretched warp hole-free.
• Six effects. Oil painting is a proper Kuwahara filter built on summed-area tables, so a 20-pixel brush costs the same as a 2-pixel one. Pencil sketch does the colour-dodge line extraction, Pixel sort is the glitch-art staple with a threshold band and a minimum run length, and Kaleidoscope, Glow / bloom and Chromatic aberration round it out.
• Colour and compositing. Apply a .cube LUT grades a batch with trilinear interpolation and an intensity slider — most published LUTs are far too strong at 100%. Auto levels stretches a flat histogram three ways: luminance-only auto contrast, per-channel levels that also remove a colour cast, and grey-world white balance. Colour splash keeps one hue and drains the rest. Apply an alpha mask uses a second image as transparency, and Feather edges either fades a border to nothing or softens an existing cut-out — with a shrink option, because blurring alpha alone grows the shape and leaves a halo of the old background.
• And. Denoise with a median filter and a chroma-only mode, Contact sheet, Add a caption, Initials avatar, and Perceptual hash for aHash, dHash and pHash values with the Hamming distance between every pair.

Usability, across all 160 tools

• A tool finder. 160 tools is more than a category menu can carry, so there is now a search box above the nav. Press / anywhere to jump into it, type, and press Enter for the top match. On a phone it stays pinned to the top of the drawer while the list scrolls.
• Paste an image. Ctrl/⌘+V now works on every tool with a drop zone — screenshot, paste, convert, with no file on disk at any point.
• Drop anywhere. Files no longer have to land on the dashed box; anywhere on the page works, and the box highlights as soon as you start dragging so you can see where it is going. Dropping something that isn't an image now says so instead of silently ignoring it.
• Download all (.zip). Any run producing more than one file gets a single zip button at the end of the list. Batch mode was always the default here; collecting the results no longer means one click per file.
• Before → after sizes. Conversion and optimisation tools show the percentage change next to each result, in green when it shrank and red when it grew — which is genuinely useful information when you are dithering a photograph and the file gets bigger.
• Batch progress. A long run now reports 3 / 12 · photo.png rather than a motionless "Processing…".
• Fixes. ⌘/Ctrl+Enter runs the current tool. Result thumbnails open full size and are keyboard-reachable. Status messages are announced to screen readers. Checkbox labels on 38 pages were stacking the box above a tiny uppercase caption — one of two class names in use had never been styled. Touch targets in the file and result lists were below the 44-pixel guideline on phones.

31 July 2026 — 50 more tools, and a nav rebuild (75 → 125)

• Format conversion (10 new). AVIF, ICO, BMP and GIF now convert to PNG, and PNG now converts out to BMP (real 24-bit and 32-bit files), TIFF (uncompressed RGB/RGBA) and SVG (traced to vector shapes, or wrapped). The BMP and TIFF encoders are written byte by byte in the browser. Plus, for developers, byte arrays in six languages, BlurHash with a decoded preview, and ASCII art.
• Optimize (8 new). Target file size binary-searches encoder quality to land under a KB figure you type. Reduce colors quantises with Floyd–Steinberg dithering and reports the bytes saved. Remove metadata strips EXIF, timestamps and colour profiles at the chunk level, passing the pixels through untouched. Also Change DPI, Social media sizes, Thumbnail set, Upscale and Pixel-art upscale.
• Layout and geometry (8 new). Join images, Overlay images with sixteen blend modes, Seamless pattern, Drop shadow, Add outline, Crop to ratio, Add padding and Polygon crop.
• Effects (11 new). Gradient map, Halftone, Dither (Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson, Bayer), Edge detect, Emboss, Posterize, Vignette, Motion blur, Hue rotate, Colour temperature and Gamma.
• Generators (6 new), no file needed. Gradient, Text to PNG, Placeholder, Checkerboard, Noise texture and Transparent PNG.
• Inspection (7 new). Chunk viewer decodes every PNG chunk with its CRC status; PNG validator runs the specification's structural checks; Transparency checker separates declared alpha from measured; Find duplicates uses a two-axis perceptual hash. Plus Histogram, Dominant colours and Average colour.
• Navigation rebuilt. The catalogue now lives in one registry that drives the megamenu, the footer, the homepage index and the sitemap, so they can't drift apart. Two new categories — Layout and Alpha — and long menus wrap into columns instead of running off the bottom of the screen.

19 July 2026 — 50 new tools (25 → 75)

• Two new categories: Effects and Colors.
• Effects (12): sharpen, sepia, duotone, change colour, black & white, brightness, contrast, saturation, glitch, duplicate grid, mirror and zoom.
• Colour-space splits (7): RGB, HSL, HSV, HSI, CMYK, YCbCr and LAB, each channel exported as a greyscale PNG in a ZIP.
• Palette generators (7): complementary, split-complementary, analogous, triadic, tetradic, monochromatic and shades — from a base colour, no image needed.
• Shape masks and geometry (8): square, star, wavy edges, rotate by angle, skew, canvas size, aspect ratio and fit-in-rectangle.
• Base64 both ways, plus opacity, circle crop, blur, grayscale, noise, alpha channel remove / extract / invert, and the analyze family (dimensions, file size, colour count, orientation).

10 May 2026 — initial launch

• 25 image tools across five mega-menu categories — Convert, Optimize, Transform, Generate, Inspect.
• Batch mode by default. Drop multiple files; get one processed file per input where it makes sense, or a single combined output.
• Convert (6): PNG → JPG, PNG → WebP, JPG / WebP → PNG, SVG → PNG, PNG → PDF, PNG → ICO.
• Optimize (4): Compress, Resize, Crop, Auto-trim.
• Transform (8): Rotate / flip, Background, Round corners, Border / frame, Pixelate / blur, Watermark, Sprite sheet, Split tiles.
• Generate (3): Solid color, Favicon kit, OG image.
• Inspect (4): Image viewer, Inspector, Color picker, Image diff.
• Sample PNGs in datasets.