Local Windows utility
Image Converter
The formats your phone, your camera and the modern web produce, turned into the ones everything else can actually open. Drop in one file or four hundred, pick a target, and get them back in the folder you chose — with orientation and colour profile carried across, because a converter that lays photos on their side is not a converter.
Converted files land in the folder you pick — your originals are left where they are.
What it's for
Real jobs — Image Converter
Not feature bullets — the actual situations people open this for.
- A trip's worth of iPhone HEICs that Windows Photos refuses to open.
- Product images saved from a website as WebP or AVIF that your listing tool rejects.
- A card full of Canon CR3 or Sony ARW files you want to look through before editing.
- A logo that has to be a multi-size .ico for a Windows app or a favicon.
- A layered .psd from a designer when you do not own Photoshop.
What it does
Everything Image Converter handles
Everything below runs on your own machine, on as many files as you give it.
Fourteen formats in, nine out
HEIC, WebP, AVIF, PNG, JPG, JPEG, JFIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF, SVG, PSD, ICO and camera RAW in. JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF, ICO and PDF out.
Renames that stay renames
JFIF is JPEG, and .jpeg and .jpg are the same bytes. PhotoTray checks the file header and then just renames — it will not decode and re-encode a lossy photo to change three letters.
Nothing lands sideways
EXIF orientation is read and applied on every conversion, and the colour profile travels with the file. Sideways photos and shifted colours are the two bugs that define a bad image tool.
Camera RAW, eight mounts
CR2 and CR3 from Canon, NEF from Nikon, ARW from Sony, DNG, and the rest — decoded by LibRaw rather than by whatever thumbnail the camera happened to embed.
ICO files that are actually ICO files
An .ico is a container of several resolutions. PhotoTray writes 16, 32, 48 and 256 pixel layers, so the icon looks right in the taskbar and in a folder view, not just in one of them.
Straight to PDF
Send images to a PDF instead of an image format — one document per file, or a whole folder merged into a single PDF in the order you choose.
How it works
From drop to done
- 1
Drop in files or a folder
Drag them onto the tile, or use the picker. Mixed formats in one batch are fine — each file is read by whatever decoder it needs.
- 2
Choose the target format
Pick what you want out and, for the lossy formats, the quality. PhotoTray tells you when a conversion is really a rename, so you know nothing is being re-encoded.
- 3
Pick where they land
Alongside the originals, or in a folder of your choosing. Originals are kept by default and PhotoTray will not overwrite them unless you ask it to.
- 4
Turn it into a rule, if you want
When the batch finishes you are offered a rule on that folder — so the next set converts on arrival without you opening the app.
Under the hood
The engines, named
The engines, named plainly — no mystery boxes.
- Core engine
- sharp (libvips) — JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, GIF, SVG rasterising
- HEIC / HEIF
- Windows Imaging Component, via a small bundled decoder we build (wic-decode)
- Camera RAW
- LibRaw — CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG and more
- Photoshop PSD
- ag-psd — flattened composite, no Photoshop needed
- ICO
- to-ico — multi-resolution 16/32/48/256 containers
- PDF output
- pdfcpu
- Platform
- Windows 10/11 (x64) — every conversion runs on your own machine
HEIC is the one format with a dependency: PhotoTray decodes it through Windows itself, so it needs Microsoft's free HEIF Image Extension present. PhotoTray checks on first run and links you to it. There is no HEIC encoder — PhotoTray reads HEIC, it does not write it. Animated WebP converts to GIF in Video Fix, not here, because keeping the animation needs a different engine.
The rest of the belt
It ships with five more
Questions
Image Converter, answered
Get the whole tray — Image Converter
Image Converter comes with PhotoTray — free for Windows 10 and 11, with the other five alongside it.