Image Preview — Open JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, ICO, SVG, AVIF, HEIC and TIFF online, flip through them one by one, rotate and zoom, with no upload

The pictures that pile up on a computer are usually more mixed than you expect: HEIC from a phone, WebP and AVIF saved from a web page, TIFF from a scanner, ICO used by Windows icons, SVG exported from a design file, plus the everyday JPG, PNG and animated GIF. The viewer built into your system is picky about formats, installing a pile of codecs is a hassle, and uploading to an online viewing site means worrying that screenshots and ID photos will be left on someone else's server. Here eleven common formats share one window: drag in several files at once, see them lined up as thumbnails, and step through them with Previous and Next; zoom in, zoom out or fit to window when a detail is hard to read, turn a sideways photo ninety degrees left or right, reset the view, flip horizontally or vertically, switch to a checkerboard background to inspect transparency, or go full screen for a closer look. Most formats are decoded natively by the browser, so animated GIFs keep playing and SVG stays vector-sharp; HEIC and some AVIF files go to a local HEIF decoder, while TIFF and older ICO files are turned into pixels with plain JavaScript, and multi-page TIFF files can be paged through one page at a time. All decoding happens on your device, the page has no upload endpoint, and the list is gone when you close the tab. The arrow keys, plus, minus, zero, R and F work directly, the mouse wheel zooms, dragging the picture pans, and checking images feels natural on desktop, tablet and phone.

Put your images here

Drop them on the page, choose files, or paste a screenshot — several at once. Images are decoded on your device and never uploaded.

Drop images here

Ctrl+V pastes a screenshot

Supported formats

JPG / JPEG
PNG
WebP
GIF
BMP
ICO
SVG
AVIF
HEIC
TIFF

Detected from the file header, so a wrong extension is fine · Local decoding · No upload · No archive

Format support and keyboard reference

The eleven formats do not all take the same route. Files the browser can decode are handed straight to it, which keeps animation and vector detail intact; only the ones it cannot read get an extra decoder inside the page. The table below explains what happens to each group.

FormatCommon extensionsHow this page handles it

JPG / JPEGJPG, JPEGDecoded natively by the browser. JPG and JPEG are two names for the same format.

PNGPNGDecoded natively by the browser. The alpha channel is kept, so a checkerboard background helps you check it.

WebPWEBPDecoded natively by the browser. Animated and transparent WebP files display normally.

GIFGIFDecoded natively by the browser. Multi-frame animation keeps playing instead of stopping on the first frame.

BMPBMPDecoded natively by the browser. Uncompressed bitmaps are shown at their original pixel size.

ICOICOTried natively first. On failure the largest frame is picked: a PNG frame is displayed directly, while a bitmap frame gets its transparency composited from the mask.

SVGSVGRendered natively as vectors. Width and height, or the viewBox, set the initial size, and enlarging stays sharp.

AVIFAVIFNative decoding first; browsers without support hand the pixels to the local HEIF decoder.

HEICHEIC, HEIFNative decoding first; most Windows browsers need the local HEIF decoder, which restores the photo pixel by pixel.

TIFFTIF, TIFFRestored page by page into pixels with the local TIFF decoder; multi-page files can be paged through in the info panel.

Every decode happens in the browser, the page has no upload endpoint, the original file is never rewritten, and the download button still gives you the file you started with.

Keyboard shortcuts

When the focus is not inside an input field, these keys control the preview window directly.

←Previous image
→Next image
Home / EndJump to the first / last image
+Zoom in
−Zoom out
0Reset to fit the window
RRotate ninety degrees right
Shift + RRotate ninety degrees left
HFlip horizontal
VFlip vertical
FExit full screen

How to use

Drag images into the page, or click Choose Images to select several at once; after taking a screenshot you can also press Ctrl+V to paste it in. The tool reads the file header before the extension, so a misnamed file is still recognised correctly.
Click any thumbnail in the strip to view it, or step through the set with the Previous and Next buttons or the arrow keys. For a multi-page TIFF an extra pair of page buttons appears in the info panel, so you can turn pages without leaving the file.
Use Zoom In, Zoom Out or the mouse wheel to change the magnification, and drag the picture to pan. Each rotate button turns the image ninety degrees; after straightening a sideways photo, choose Fit to Window to bring it back into view, or Reset to return to the starting view in one click.
Switch the background to a checkerboard or a dark tone when you need to check transparency, and use Full Screen to fill the display. Horizontal and vertical flipping, downloading the original file and opening it in a new tab are described in the reference table below, along with every keyboard shortcut. Just close the page when you are done — the files never leave your device.

Frequently asked questions

Why do HEIC, AVIF or TIFF files sometimes show up as blank?

Because an img element only ships with some decoders. JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP and SVG almost always display directly, and Safari can even read HEIC natively, but Chrome and Firefox have never built in support for HEIC or TIFF. This page tries native display first, then loads the matching decoder only when that fails: HEIC and some AVIF files go through libheif compiled to WebAssembly, TIFF goes through UTIF, and the decoded pixels are turned into a PNG for the img element. The decoder is downloaded only when such a file really arrives, so ordinary photos do not wait for it.

Does previewing compress or alter my original file?

No. Zooming, rotating, mirroring and panning are only CSS transforms applied to the displayed copy; not a byte of the file on disk is rewritten, and repeated zooming does not add another round of lossy compression. Formats such as HEIC, TIFF and ICO that must be decoded into pixels in memory leave the original untouched as well — a temporary PNG is produced inside the page purely for display. The download button gives you the original file you dragged in, not that temporary copy.

Are my images uploaded? Can I get the list back after closing the page?

Nothing is uploaded. The page has no upload endpoint, decoding and rendering happen entirely on your machine, and images already loaded keep working if you go offline after the first load. Because the data lives only in memory, refreshing or closing the tab clears the list; thumbnails and rotation angles are not restored, so keep your own copies of anything you need to archive. Only viewing preferences, such as the background tone of the preview stage, are stored locally in the browser.

Will an animated GIF keep moving, and does SVG blur when enlarged?

It keeps moving, and it does not blur. Precisely because the browser's native img element is used first, a GIF plays its full frame timeline instead of freezing on the first frame as a canvas conversion would, and SVG stays a vector description whose edges are drawn afresh by the browser even at eight hundred percent. Neither type is resampled into pixels, so transparency and animation timing stay exactly as they were in the original file.

How are multi-page TIFF files and the several sizes inside an ICO handled?

A multi-page TIFF is recognised as one file with page numbers, so Previous Page and Next Page appear in the info panel and each page is decoded on demand; turning pages and moving between files are two separate operations. An ICO often holds 16, 32, 48 and 256 pixel versions of the same icon, so this page shows the frame with the largest area. If that frame is a PNG it goes straight to the browser; if it is an old-style bitmap, the transparency is composited from its mask.

What is it

Previewing is, at bottom, the browser turning compressed bytes back into pixels and then placing those pixels on screen from a human point of view. The formats differ only in that first step: JPG discards high-frequency detail with a discrete cosine transform and a quantisation table, PNG keeps everything with DEFLATE and carries an alpha channel, WebP and AVIF borrow intra-frame prediction from video codecs, GIF packs a palette of at most 256 colours together with several animation frames, and SVG stores no pixels at all, only paths and text. Browsers ship decoders for the first group, so this page hands the file to an img element first: animations do not stop on frame one, vectors do not blur when enlarged, and rotation and zoom are pure CSS transforms, so nothing is re-encoded and no second round of quality loss occurs. A few formats need one more step. HEIC and AVIF share the ISO base media file format container, and some browsers have no decoder for it, so a libheif build compiled to WebAssembly decodes the pixels inside the page. TIFF is a tagged container defined for scanners in 1986; one file can hold several pages and several compression schemes, so UTIF restores each page to RGBA. An ICO can hold either a PNG or a bitmap with an AND mask, so the largest frame is picked and its transparency is composited locally. These decoders load on demand only when needed, so an ordinary photo does not download several megabytes of code for nothing. Formats are identified from the file header first and the extension second, so a wrong extension is not enough to get a file rejected.

Origin & history

Lay out the timeline of common image formats and you find that almost every one answers a specific need. In 1986 Aldus and Microsoft defined TIFF for scanning and page layout, describing pixels through a directory of tags and allowing one file to hold several pages and several compression schemes; fax and document archiving finally had a common container, at the cost of so many parsing branches that viewers usually implement only a fraction of them. In 1987 CompuServe released GIF, and LZW compression plus a 256-colour palette made small animations popular over dial-up connections. JPEG arrived in 1992: a discrete cosine transform and a quantisation table squeezed a photograph into a few dozen kilobytes, and JFIF soon made it the default language of cameras, web pages and email. In 1995 PNG used lossless DEFLATE to add an alpha channel, solving both GIF's 256-colour limit and the LZW patent problem. Around the same time Windows made ICO its icon container, with several sizes in one file, early frames stored as bitmaps with an AND mask and later ones allowed to hold a PNG directly. W3C drafted SVG in 1999, writing graphics as paths and text and leaving the pixel grid behind altogether. Google released WebP in 2010, MPEG finalised HEIF in 2015 while Apple adopted HEIC for iPhone photos, and AVIF in 2019 borrowed AV1 to cut file sizes again. Each new generation saves more space, yet the old formats linger because of printers, archive systems and ageing hardware, so a single computer can hold more than a dozen containers spanning forty years. Viewers followed a separate line: from ACDSee, which had to be installed on its own in the nineties, through the Windows Picture Viewer, to the browser turning the img element into the de facto universal viewer. The browser wins by needing no installation and updating itself, but it also has its own boundary — whatever decoders the operating system has installed are irrelevant, because it recognises only the ones built into itself. Once client-side decoding libraries filled those gaps, local viewing no longer had to borrow capability from any server; what really changed across this history is not that formats became fewer, but that "cannot open" went from installing another program to loading a small piece of code on demand.