Do online image tools upload your files?
Browser image tools can genuinely process files locally, but the useful question is narrower: which bytes leave your machine, which stay in the page, and what happens when you close the tab.
Your own browser does the work
When you select an image, your browser decodes it with the same APIs a local editor uses, draws the result into an in-page canvas and re-encodes it there. The file is never copied to a PixelKit server, because the tool has no upload step to copy it to.
The practical consequence is that the file stays on the device, and the processing speed depends on your machine rather than on a connection.
What still reaches the network
The page itself has to load: HTML, styles and scripts come from the hosting provider, so ordinary request information such as your IP address, browser details and the pages you open reach that provider.
That traffic is about the website, not about your files. The privacy page describes hosting and optional Google AdSense advertising separately. PixelKit never sends your selected image contents, filenames or image metadata to Google for advertising.
What is stored, and for how long
Selected images and their results live in page memory only. Refreshing, closing or navigating away clears the queue, and downloads go to wherever your browser normally saves files.
The single item kept in browser storage is the language preference.
Why this matters for sensitive files
Unpublished product shots, client work under an agreement and identity documents should not be handed to an upload service as a side effect of resizing them. Local processing removes that copy entirely.
It does not remove the need to trust what you loaded. A script served by any site can read what you select, so if that trust is not there, use an offline editor for that material.
Check it yourself
- Open your browser developer tools network panel while processing an image and watch for upload requests
- Refresh the page and confirm the queue is gone
- Read the privacy page for what the host receives
- Keep originals for anything you would not want to lose, since processing never overwrites them