OpenFile blog

Guides, tips and behind the scenes notes on private, in-browser file tools, with live demos.

• Install OpenFile on any device, from a phone to a Linux box (2026-10-28): Web app, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iPhone: what each option gives you, how to install it, and which one I would pick for your device.
• How OpenFile keeps your files private (2026-10-27): What really happens when you drop a file into OpenFile, why nothing gets uploaded, and how you can check it yourself in two minutes.
• How AI models run inside your browser tab (2026-10-26): What happens when you press the button in the background remover, upscaler or transcriber: model downloads, workers, WebGPU and the WebAssembly safety net.
• Ten PDF tips that save me time every week (2026-10-24): Page ranges, smart compression, signing, OCR and the order I run things in. Small habits that make PDF work painless.
• Shrink a PDF to fit an email limit (2026-10-23): Gmail, Outlook and upload forms all have size caps. A practical routine to get under them: find the heavy part, pick the right preset, and split when you must.
• Image compression explained, with a slider you can drag (2026-10-21): Lossy, lossless, JPG, WebP and AVIF in plain words. Drag the slider to see what quality settings actually do to a picture.
• HEIC, JPG, AVIF and JPEG XL compared (2026-10-20): Four photo formats, what each one is good at, which browsers open them, and which I use for sharing, the web and my own archive. Test your browser live.
• Editing video in a browser tab with WebAssembly (2026-10-18): How ffmpeg runs inside your browser, why the first run downloads an engine, and how to get the best speed out of it.
• Make a good GIF from a video clip (2026-10-17): Why GIFs get huge, and the four settings that fix it: width, frame rate, length and colours. Includes a planner that estimates the size before you convert.
• Building a batch pipeline for 200 product photos (2026-10-15): A real walk through of the Workspace: resize, watermark, strip metadata, convert and zip, then save it as a recipe you can run again.
• Fill and sign PDFs without uploading them (2026-10-14): Form fields, signature images and certificate signatures explained, plus the order I fill, sign and flatten documents in, all inside the browser.
• Sketch board tips: draw diagrams faster (2026-10-12): Shortcuts, snapping, frames and export tricks for the Sketch board. Try the shortcut trainer right in the post.
• EPUB, MOBI, PDF and comics: an ebook conversion guide (2026-10-11): Reflowable versus fixed layout, which ebook format to keep, and how to convert, fix and read books on your device. With a live reflow demo.
• A friendly guide to file formats (2026-10-09): Which format to use for what, and what each one is good and bad at. Includes an interactive format explorer.
• Opening DXF and CAD drawings in a browser (2026-10-08): What a DXF file really contains, how to view layers and measure without AutoCAD, and how to turn a drawing into a PDF anyone can print.
• The developer tools I reach for every day (2026-10-06): JSON, JWT, regex, hashes, cURL and cron: a quick tour of the dev tools in OpenFile, with a live JSON formatter to play with.
• Looking at your own CT and MRI scans, privately (2026-10-05): What DICOM files are, why window and level matter so much, and how to view and share your scans without uploading medical data anywhere.
• Text to speech that never leaves your device (2026-10-03): How OpenFile reads text aloud with your system voices, and falls back to a small neural voice model that runs in the tab.
• MIDI files explained, with a piano roll you can play (2026-10-01): Why a MIDI file has no sound in it, what note numbers, velocity and channels mean, and how to play and render MIDI to MP3 or WAV in the browser.
• CSV, JSON, Excel and Parquet: converting data without losing it (2026-09-27): What each data format can and cannot hold, where conversions quietly break, and the tools I use to move data between them locally.
• A practical guide to subtitles: SRT, VTT and ASS (2026-09-23): The three subtitle formats you will meet, and how to fix the usual problems: wrong format, broken letters, drifting timing and missing tracks.