PhotoTray 1.0 — the first release

PhotoTray is a tray-resident photo utility for Windows. You point it at the folders your photos land in, and it fixes them on arrival — converts the formats Windows will not open, resizes and compresses, renames and files them by date, and strips GPS before they go anywhere.

Everything runs on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, there are no file limits, and there is no watermark.

What's in it

• Image Converter — HEIC, WebP, AVIF, RAW, PSD, TIFF, SVG, ICO and the classic pairs, in and out. Orientation and colour profile are preserved on every conversion, and the extension renames (jfif → jpg, jpeg → jpg) verify the file header and then rename rather than re-encoding a lossy photo to change three letters.
• Resize & Compress — a dimension cap, a target file size, a lossless pass, or a batch crop, across whole folders.
• AI Enhance — 2× and 4× upscaling with Real-ESRGAN, and one-click background removal. Both run locally on your CPU; no account, no credits, no upload.
• Photo Organizer — rename from the date the camera recorded, file into year and month folders, and find duplicates by how they look rather than by file size.
• Privacy Scrub — inspect what a photo is carrying, then remove the location, the camera details, or all of it.
• Video Fix — the phone clips that land beside the photos. It probes each file first, so a stream Windows can already play is rewrapped in about a second with no quality loss, and only genuine HEVC gets a full conversion.

Folder rules

The part that makes it worth installing rather than bookmarking: after a batch finishes, PhotoTray offers to turn what you just did into a rule on that folder.

From then on it happens on arrival — the HEICs from your phone import are already JPGs when you go looking for them. Rules keep your originals by default, and PhotoTray refuses to replace or delete files inside a cloud-synced folder such as iCloud Photos or OneDrive, where a change propagates to every device you own.

Things worth knowing

We would rather tell you these now than have you find them.

• HEIC needs Microsoft's free HEIF Image Extension. PhotoTray decodes HEIC through Windows' own imaging component, so the extension has to be present. It checks on first run and links you straight to it — about ten seconds, no restart.
• Metadata cannot be stripped from a HEIC in place. Removing metadata means rewriting the file without it, and PhotoTray reads HEIC but cannot write it. So a HEIC is scrubbed and saved as a JPG, or declined with an explanation. It will never hand back a file that looks cleaned and is not.
• AI upscaling is slow on a CPU. That is the cost of not requiring a graphics card. A 4× upscale of a 12-megapixel photo takes minutes; the estimate is shown before the queue starts.
• Photo Organizer never runs unattended. Deciding which copy of a photo to keep needs a person, so it is deliberately excluded from folder rules and deletes nothing on its own.

How it's funded

PhotoTray shares a slice of your device's idle bandwidth, when it can, through a vetted partner. You are asked plainly at install, before anything runs, and the tools pause while sharing is off — that is the trade, and it is why there is no subscription, no advertising and no file limit.

Only one Clearware app can share on a device at a time, which is why the wording is "when it can" rather than a flat promise. The full explanation is on How it's funded.