About Whichly

Whichly is a collection of small tools for the jobs that interrupt your actual work: compressing a PDF that will not attach, cropping a photo to a passport specification, pulling the text out of a scan, converting a video someone sent in the wrong format.

The tools run on your device, not on a server

This is the part worth being precise about, because "secure" and "private" are words every competitor also uses while uploading your file. On Whichly the processing happens in your browser tab. The PDF engine, the image work, the video transcoding and the text recognition are all JavaScript and WebAssembly running on your own machine. Your file is read from disk by the page you are looking at and never sent anywhere.

You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and use any tool on this site: you will see the code and the engines download, and you will not see your file go up. That check takes about thirty seconds and it works on any site, including the ones that do upload.

The practical consequences are worth knowing too. Large files are limited by your device's memory rather than by an upload quota, so a very long video may be slower here than on a site with a server farm behind it. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to log in to and nothing to delete. And when a tool is not possible in a browser, it is not offered — the site would rather have a gap than a page that quietly ships your documents somewhere.

How the site pays for itself

Hosting, domains and time are not free, so the plan is advertising and, on some pages, affiliate links to paid products that do a job these tools deliberately do not. Ads are not running yet. When they are, they will sit below the tool rather than around it, and the analytics that measure which tools are worth keeping only start after you accept them — the banner is a real gate, not a notice.

What the site will not do: sell your files, sell your email, require an account for a download, or watermark the output and then charge to remove it. Those are the standard business models in this category and they are the reason this site exists.

Who is behind it

Whichly is built and maintained by one independent developer, working on it alongside other work rather than as a funded company. That is relevant to you in two ways: there is no support department, and there is also nobody with an incentive to change the privacy model once somebody offers money for the data.

Corrections are genuinely welcome — several tool pages carry technical specifics that a practitioner would notice if they were wrong. If you find one, or a tool misbehaves on a real file, write to [email protected] and say what you were doing when it broke. See the contact page for what is useful to include.