When the browser wins and when your machine does
The well known web converters are the right tool for some jobs, and this page starts by saying so. It is also honest about where they stop making sense. Most of that is arithmetic, not opinion.
v0.1.0 · Windows 10 and later · macOS on Apple Silicon · free for personal use
The honest case for the browser tab
There is nothing to install and nothing to keep updated. For one small image the job is done before a desktop app would have finished downloading, in a tab you close afterwards. That is a real advantage, not a grudging one.
On a phone, or on a locked-down office machine where installing anything means a ticket to IT, the browser is not the convenient option, it is the only one. Online tools win those cases outright, and no desktop app should pretend otherwise.
The trouble starts along two lines. Files that are big or many, where the upload itself becomes the job. And files whose contents are not yours to hand over to a server you know nothing about.
Minutes of uploading before any work starts
A web converter cannot touch a file until the upload finishes, and the upload runs at your uplink speed, not the download speed on the ads. The wait before any work begins is pure arithmetic.
| File | At 20 Mbps up | At 100 Mbps up |
|---|---|---|
| A 50 MB phone clip | About 20 seconds | A few seconds |
| 500 MB | About 3 minutes | Under a minute |
| 2 GB | About 13 minutes | Under 3 minutes |
| 5 GB | About half an hour | About 7 minutes |
The top row is why online tools feel instant, the bottom rows are why they stop. Most home connections sit in the slower column, uplink is a fraction of the advertised download speed. And the finished file still has to come back down the same wire.
What you trade, in both directions
An uploaded file sits on someone else's server under a retention policy you have to go read. For client work, unreleased products or anything under an NDA, that is a real problem, and not because anyone there is malicious. For a meme it is no problem at all.
Then there are the meters. Free tiers cap files per day and megabytes per file, and background removal is typically billed per image, around €0.20 at list rates. Fair enough, servers cost money, but worth knowing before you start on a 300 image job.
A desktop app flips that trade: work starts the moment you drop the files, and the only batch limit is your disk. The price is paid once instead of running on a meter. The honest cost is an install to keep updated, and encode time that runs on your own CPU rather than on a server farm.
Questions
- Is my connection the bottleneck?
- For anything past a few hundred megabytes, usually yes. Consumer plans advertise the download number, and the upload speed in the small print is a fraction of it. Run a speed test if you are unsure, then the table above turns your number into minutes.
- Are online converters unsafe?
- Not inherently, and this page will not pretend they are. The reputable ones publish retention policies and delete uploads on a schedule, and there is no reason to assume bad faith. The real question is need to know: whether that file has any business sitting on a third-party server at all.
- What about a Chromebook?
- Use an online converter there, that is the platform working as designed and the browser is the app model. Kovert runs on Windows and macOS, not on ChromeOS. The same answer goes for a tablet or a phone.
- Does Kovert phone home?
- No. Conversion is fully local, the app works offline, and nothing you drop into it leaves the machine. If you want proof rather than a promise, pull the network cable and convert something.
Related
- Compress video
Where the upload arithmetic hurts most, multi-gigabyte video files.
- HEIC to JPG
The camera roll case: thousands of small files in one batch.
- Background remover
The feature the web meters at €0.20 an image, done locally instead.
Point it at a folder and see what comes back.
v0.1.0 · Windows 10 and later · macOS on Apple Silicon