Image tools changelog

New tool: open one photo and turn it into a tilting 3D pop-out, a relief plaque or a backlit lithophane, then download a file that is checked and ready to 3D print. These are raised pictures, not full 3D figurines.

Three ways to use a photo

• Pop-out: the photo gains depth you can tilt with a finger, a mouse or the phone's motion. Export a looping MP4 or GIF, a GLB, or view it in AR.
• Relief plaque: two on-device readers shape it, one for the large shape and one for surface direction, so noses, eyes, fur and stonework come out as form. Skin tone and tattoos are not carved in as fake bumps.
• Lithophane: thickness follows how light passes through white PLA, with a backlit preview of the print.

A print check on every file

• Watertight: one closed solid with no open edges.
• Size: the stated millimetres match the file, against a 180 mm print bed.
• Thinnest part: shown in red if any point is under the 0.8 mm safe minimum.
• Hanging hole: added only where it fits, and the check says why when it doesn't.
• Formats: STL, 3MF, and a 16-bit depth PNG for laser engraving and CNC.

Honest about depth

• Can't tell: a blank, uniform or sky-only photo says so, and offers a lithophane instead of inventing a relief.
• Not much depth: a flat picture, such as a poster, gets a plain warning.
• One download, then offline: the two readers (about 120 MB) are checked against their fingerprints and kept for later visits.

Compress Image to KB now lands a photo, signature or scan inside the size range a portal asks for, such as 20–50 KB for a photo or 10–20 KB for a signature, at the pixel size the portal names.

What's new

• Between two sizes: choose Between and enter a minimum and a maximum, such as 20 and 50 KB. The file lands between 20,480 and 50,000 bytes, which passes whether a portal counts 1 KB as 1,000 or 1,024 bytes.
• Exact pixel size: set a width and height in pixels, centimetres or inches at a DPI. Preferred lets Loft adjust the size when the file can't otherwise reach the range, and says so; Required keeps it exact. Crop to fill (keeping the top, centre or bottom) or fit inside on white.
• Signature clean-up: whitens the paper, darkens the ink and trims the margins of a signature, thumb impression or handwritten page, with a before-and-after preview. Your strokes are never redrawn.
• Exam and portal presets: IBPS photo, signature, left thumb impression and handwritten declaration; SSC CGL signature; UPSC photo and signature; NEET (UG) photo, signature and impressions; and the SSCASN KTP scan. Each preset quotes its notice, links to it, shows the date it was checked, and sets JPEG and any required file name, such as UPSC's photo.jpg.

Improvements

• Plain words when a size can't be reached: the row shows "Below 10 KB" or "Over 20 KB" with a sentence saying why and what to change, and keeps the closest file for download. Loft never pads a file with filler bytes.
• Fewer tries for big photos: a large photo going to a small limit now finds its pixel size in a few encodes instead of shrinking 15% at a time, and keeps more of its pixels.

Bug fixes

• Photos for 20–50 KB portals used to land just under 20 KB, which those portals reject. A minimum now raises the quality, up to full colour detail, until the photo reaches it.
• "Preserve metadata" could push a file over its limit. The metadata's bytes now count toward the size.

ID Photo Maker now takes each document's size and file rules from the authority's own page, and the result says exactly which rules it checked and which it did not.

Improvements

• India and UK passports at the published sizes: an Indian passport photo is now 630 × 810 pixels, as passportindia.gov.in requires, saved as a JPEG under the 250 KB that applications through Indian missions abroad allow. A UK passport photo is now 630 × 810 pixels, above GOV.UK's 600 × 750 minimum, and is encoded to land between 50 KB and 10 MB.
• The result shows what it checked: the result checks pixels, file size and format against the official page, links that page with the date it was checked, and lists what it does not check: head size, expression, lighting and background evenness. Documents with no official file rules on file say so.
• Photos print at their true size: the print sheet places each copy at the document's size in millimetres, so an Indian passport photo prints at 35 × 45 mm on a 4×6 in sheet.
• Crop only where the rules say so: Indian, South Korean, New Zealand and Australian passport photos join the US, UK and Canada in being cropped and resized only, with no background edits unless you choose them. The result then marks the photo as edited.
• Minimum file sizes met: where a form sets a minimum, such as 50 KB for the UK or the US visa's compression limit, JPEG quality rises until the file meets it, and the result says so if it cannot.
• Lighter on mobile data: the background-removal model downloads ahead of time only for documents that allow background edits, and never ahead of time with Data Saver on. Crop-only documents fetch it only if you choose to replace the background.
• Clear notices for photographer-only documents: Canada takes only photos from a commercial photographer, and in Germany the photographer or the passport office supplies the photo, so the result says this file can't be used for those applications and offers no print sheet.
• Japan is crop-only: the Japanese guidelines reject masked or flipped photos, so Japanese passport photos are cropped and resized only.
• Webcam photos keep their true orientation: a webcam selfie is no longer saved mirrored, and it follows the document's crop-only rule.

A batch of everyday tools built on the same on-device OCR stack — your photos and documents never leave the browser.

• Business Card to vCard: snap a card, get an editable contact, download a .vcf — or scan the on-screen QR with your phone and the contact imports in one tap.
• Passport MRZ Reader: reads the machine-readable zone of passports and ID cards and recomputes every ICAO check digit, with a per-field valid/invalid badge. Paste or correct the raw MRZ text and it re-validates live. Built local-only because a passport photo is exactly what should never touch a server.
• Screenshot to CSV: press Ctrl+V on a screenshot of any table and the rows and columns come back as data. Copy tab-separated for Excel/Sheets, fix the odd column with merge/delete controls, or download a CSV.
• Whiteboard Photo Cleanup: shadows and lighting gradients flattened to a clean white, marker strokes deepened, board auto-cropped — with before/after compare and three strengths.
• Recipe Scaler: paste a recipe or snap a cookbook page, re-portion to any serving count with kitchen-real rounding (eggs stay whole, cups land on eighths), flip metric/US, and check the substitution table when you're missing an ingredient.

The ID Photo Maker got a ground-up rewrite. It now supports 156 countries with ICAO baseline specs plus 10 government-specific overrides (US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, etc.) so each document type matches its real legal requirement for size, head proportion, and background.

Key changes:

• New combobox country/document picker — type to filter, no more scrolling through a long list.
• Background removal moved into a dedicated Web Worker so the UI stays responsive while the AI model runs. Two model choices: a fast 5 MB U-2-Netp for the standard tier and a 115 MB BiRefNet-lite premium model with sharper edges.
• Jurisdictional AI compliance — US, UK, and Canadian passport flows now skip AI background replacement by default with a clear opt-in warning, because those governments forbid digitally altered backgrounds.
• Mobile native camera — phones now launch the OS camera app for the best sensor resolution instead of an in-browser camera widget.
• Multi-size print sheets — drop your photo onto 4×6 in, 9×13 cm, 10×15 cm, or 13×18 cm paper layouts ready to print at any drugstore kiosk.
• New crop tool with frame-on-photo positioning model, free pan, rotation, and native touch gestures — replaces the prior cropper that had occasional pinch-zoom issues.
• Passport Photo Maker and Baby Passport Photo also restored as dedicated tools alongside the general ID flow.

The "extract from URL" feature in Image to Favicon used to immediately send every typed domain to Google's favicon service. It now tries https://{your-domain}/favicon.ico directly first, and only falls back to Google if the direct fetch fails (no CORS, missing icon, etc.). An on-screen note tells you upfront what the policy is, and a secondary status line confirms when the Google fallback was actually used.

Two tools were soft-archived as part of the pre-launch catalogue cleanup:

• Instagram Grid Splitter
• Watermark Image

Their pages still resolve for anyone who has a saved link, but they no longer appear in navigation, category pages, or search.