About Private Online Tools

A file workbench that does its work in your browser tab, so your documents never reach anyone else's computer.

The problem this exists for

Almost every free file tool online works the same way. You hand over the document, a server you know nothing about does the work, and you get the result back. In between, your file sat on someone else's computer. For a holiday snap that is fine. For a payslip, a contract, a medical letter or a scan of your passport, it is a strange thing to have agreed to.

The usual reassurance is a sentence promising the file is deleted after an hour. That promise is only necessary because the file was theirs to hold in the first place.

What this does instead

Every tool here runs inside your browser tab. Your file is read into memory on your own computer, edited there, and written back out as a download. It is never transmitted, because there is nowhere for it to be transmitted to: this site has no server that accepts files, and no account system that would need one.

That is not a policy decision that could be reversed in a later update. It is how the software is built.

How you can check

A privacy claim you cannot verify is just marketing, so the site is built to be checked rather than trusted:

• The libraries are served from here. The PDF and compression code and the typeface come from this domain rather than from a CDN, so using a tool does not announce you to anyone.
• A Content-Security-Policy that enforces it. The browser is told which hosts this page may talk to, and the list is analytics and nothing else. An upload to anywhere would be blocked by the browser and reported in the console, even if some future change tried it by mistake.
• Watch it yourself. Open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and edit a file. You will see the analytics ping and nothing else - no request carries your document, because no request contains it. Better still, turn your Wi-Fi off: every tool keeps working.

What is on the bench

Six benches, one workbench. They share a single canvas, a single list of pending changes and a single Save, so a job that touches two kinds of file does not mean two websites.

• PDFs - merge, reorder, rotate and delete pages, drop the blank ones, and redact. Redaction flattens the page to an image, because a black rectangle drawn over text hides nothing: the words stay in the file and any reader copies them straight out.
• Photos - resize, crop to a shape, convert between WebP, JPEG and PNG, adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and vibrance, add a vignette, a watermark or a colour look.
• Video - trim, crop, resize, rotate, change speed, play backwards, and grade with the same looks as the stills.
• Audio - trim and change speed over a waveform, so a cut can be aimed at something you can see.
• Converting and inspecting - formats in and out, and a plain reading of what a file actually contains.

Nothing is written until you press Save. Every change is queued as a line you can untick, so a wrong turn costs one click rather than a re-import.

Where it stops

A tool that runs in a tab has real limits, and they are more useful stated than discovered:

• Saved video has no sound. The encoder in the browser writes a picture track only, so a trimmed or retimed clip comes back silent. Audio is its own bench until that changes.
• Your machine is the machine. A very large file can be slow or run out of memory, because the work is happening on your computer rather than on a rented one.
• Some tools are not built yet. Where that is true the page says so plainly instead of showing controls that do nothing.

An agent can use it too

The site registers its tools with WebMCP, so an AI agent running in your browser can operate the same workbench you do - "make these forty photographs 2000px wide and convert them to WebP" is a few tool calls rather than a few hundred clicks.

Two things make that worth having rather than alarming. The first is that the agent never sees your files: the tools return facts about a document - how many pages, what size, which format - and never its contents. The agent supplies the intent, the page holds the file, and the two never meet. The second is that nothing an agent does is applied behind your back: its changes land on the same visible list as yours, tagged with who added them, and you can untick any of them before saving.

The tools registered track what is actually open. With an empty bench an agent sees two; open a photograph and it sees thirteen. When your browser supports WebMCP the panel on the right lists them live.

It costs you nothing in tokens either: there is no assistant built into this page. Your own agent does the thinking, on your own account.

WebMCP is new, and today it needs Chrome 149 or later with chrome://flags/#enable-webmcp-testing turned on. Without it the site is exactly as capable by hand, which is how most people will use it for a while yet.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no account to make. Since the work happens on your computer rather than on rented servers, running the site costs about the same whether ten people use it or ten thousand.

Who makes it

Private Online Tools is built and maintained by Javier Cristobal. If something is broken, wrong, or missing, tell me about it - it is a small project and that feedback is how it gets better.

Last updated 17 September 2026.