Guides
Longer, plain-language articles on the formats these tools work with — what they are, when to use them, and the traps worth knowing. Written from building the converters themselves.
Images and photos
Why the same picture can be 12 MB or 300 KB, why an iPhone photo refuses to open on Windows, and what a photo carries besides pixels.
Image formats explained
JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC and SVG — how they differ and when to use each.
Covers what lossy and lossless actually mean in practice, why a screenshot saved as JPG looks smeared around text, and which format to reach for when the answer is not obvious.
Optimizing images for the web
Right-sizing, format choice and lazy loading for faster pages.
How to pick a width before you pick a format, what actually makes a page feel slow on a phone connection, and why the biggest win is usually resizing rather than re-encoding.
Why iPhone HEIC photos won’t open
What HEIC is, why it causes trouble, and how to convert it.
What Apple actually changed in 2017, why Windows asks you to buy a codec, and the three ways out — including the one that does not involve installing anything.
What your photos reveal
EXIF, GPS and metadata — and how to check or strip them.
The GPS coordinates, serial numbers and timestamps a photo carries by default, which platforms strip them, and how to check before you post rather than after.
Data and spreadsheets
Moving tables between Excel, code and APIs is where quiet data loss happens. This is what survives the trip and what does not.
Documents and PDFs
Choosing between editable and final-form documents, and getting text back out of a PDF that may not contain any.
Working with PDFs
Merging, splitting, extracting text and converting pages.
Merging and splitting without re-compressing pages, and why some PDFs give up their text instantly while others are just pictures of words.
Choosing a document format
DOCX, PDF, TXT and HTML — editing versus distribution.
DOCX for work in progress, PDF for the version that must not change, HTML for the web — and what gets lost at each border crossing.
Compression, captions and codes
The smaller formats that quietly run everything else: archives, subtitle tracks and QR codes.
File compression explained
ZIP, GZIP, lossy and lossless, and why some files barely shrink.
Why a folder of text files shrinks to a tenth of its size while a folder of photos barely moves, and when zipping something is simply wasted effort.
Subtitle formats explained
SRT, WebVTT and how captions actually work.
How a caption file is really just timestamps and text, why SRT plays everywhere except in a browser, and what VTT adds on top.
How QR codes work
Structure, error correction, and static vs dynamic codes.
What the black squares in the corners do, how much damage a code can survive, and why the printed size matters more than the design.