Free online tools for PDFs, images and everyday numbers

Most of what people need a computer for on any given afternoon is small: a PDF that has to be two pages shorter, a photo that has to be under 50KB, a loan repayment that has to be checked before signing. None of that is worth installing software for, and none of it should require an account. Everything here is grouped by what you are holding — a document, an image, or a number.

If you have a PDF

Start with what you want to change about it. To put several files together, use Merge PDF; to pull pages out or break one file into several, use Split PDF. If a mail server or an upload form is refusing the file for being too large, Compress PDF is the one you want — scanned documents usually shrink dramatically, while a PDF that is mostly text is already close to as small as it gets.

The converters handle the other direction: turning pages into images with PDF to JPG, or building a document out of photos of a form with JPG to PDF. If you are assembling a scanned application, converting the photos into one PDF is almost always what the portal is asking for, even when it does not say so.

If you have a photo

Two different things get called "size", and mixing them up is why uploads get rejected. Dimensions are the width and height in pixels or millimetres — 35×45mm for a driving licence photo, 150×150 pixels for a forum avatar. File size is how many kilobytes the file takes up. A form usually specifies both, and satisfying one does nothing for the other.

So do them in order. Crop and set the dimensions first — with Crop Image, Resize Image or one of the fixed-size tools — and only then compress down to the KB limit with Compress Image. Compressing first and cropping afterwards throws away detail for nothing, because the crop changes the file size again.

If a form keeps rejecting your upload

Indian government and recruitment portals — SSC, the Railway Recruitment Boards, Parivahan, PAN, voter registration — are strict in ways they rarely explain. A few things that account for most rejections:

• The limit is a maximum, not a target. "Photo must be 20KB–50KB" means the file has to land inside that window; 12KB fails just as surely as 80KB. The size-specific tools aim inside the range rather than compressing as hard as possible.
• Format matters. Most portals accept JPG only. A PNG renamed to .jpg is still a PNG and will be refused. Convert it properly with PNG to JPG.
• Signatures usually have their own rules — a wider aspect ratio, a smaller file, and sometimes black ink specifically. If you signed in blue, the signature ink converter will do it without a rescan.
• Check the result before you upload. Every tool here shows the final dimensions and file size, so you can confirm the numbers match the instructions rather than finding out from an error message.

If you have a number to work out

The calculators cover the arithmetic that is easy to get subtly wrong: EMI and loan repayments, GST added or extracted from an invoice total, compound interest over a period, an exact age in years, months and days for a form that wants it as of a particular date. Each one shows its working, not just an answer, so you can check the assumption it made rather than trusting it.

Where your files are processed

It depends on the tool, and it is worth knowing which is which. The image, text and calculator tools run entirely inside your browser using JavaScript and the Canvas API — the file is read from your device, worked on in memory, and handed back, without ever being sent anywhere. A smaller number of tools need server-side libraries to do their job at all: PDF merging, splitting and compression among them. Those upload the file, process it and return the result. They are not used for any other purpose. If a document is sensitive enough that this matters to you, the privacy policy sets out what is and is not retained.