How it works, and why it is private
Most online background removers upload your photo to a server, run a model there and send the result back. This one ships the model to you instead. The first time you use it, your browser downloads a small neural network, MODNet for people (6.6 MB) or U²-Netp for objects (4.6 MB), and runs it with ONNX Runtime Web, using your graphics card through WebGPU where the browser supports it and WebAssembly otherwise. The photo is decoded, segmented, edited and encoded entirely on your device. There is no account and no server copy, and nothing to delete afterwards.
The status line under the image tells you which model ran, on which backend, and how long it took. Auto mode decides for you: if the face detector finds a face covering more than 8% of the picture it uses the portrait model, which is good at hair; otherwise it uses the object model, which finds the most prominent thing in the frame. You can override it with Person or Product or object.
Which photos work well
- Clear separation. A subject that stands out from its background in colour or brightness gives the cleanest edge. A black dog on a black sofa is hard for any model.
- One main subject. The object model finds the most salient thing. In a cluttered scene, crop to the subject first or clean up with the brush.
- Sharp edges. Motion blur and very shallow depth of field make edges ambiguous. A sharp photo always cuts better.
- Even light. Strong shadows on the background can be read as part of the subject; the Remove brush fixes them in a few strokes.
- Hair against a plain background comes out best with the portrait model. Fine flyaways against a busy background will be softened.
Fixing edges with the brush
No model is perfect, so every result can be edited. Pick Keep and paint over anything that was wrongly removed, such as the gap between an arm and a body or a handle of a mug. Pick Remove and paint over leftovers. The brush is soft-edged, sized in screen pixels, and every stroke can be undone. Your edits sit on top of the model's mask, so changing the feather or cut-off afterwards does not throw them away.
Two sliders handle the edge itself. Feather (0–6 px) softens the transition, which helps a cut-out sit naturally on a new background. Edge cut-off removes faint, semi-transparent pixels, the grey halo you sometimes see around a cut-out on a dark background. Despill removes a green or blue fringe left by a green screen or a sky.
Backgrounds
Choose transparent for a PNG or WebP you will place on something else, a colour (with pure white, light grey and passport off-white presets), a blurred version of the original for a portrait-mode look, or an image of your own. A drop shadow grounds product cut-outs on a plain background. The square framing option centres the subject and scales it to fill a set share of a square, which is what most marketplaces want.
White-background product photos for marketplaces
Marketplaces have their own image rules, and they change. As commonly reported, Amazon's main image should be on pure white (RGB 255, 255, 255), with the product filling about 85% of the frame and nothing else in the picture. eBay asks for at least 500 pixels on the longest side and recommends about 1,600, and says white backgrounds generally work best. These figures could not all be confirmed on the marketplaces' own pages, so check the current rules. The product photo preset starts on pure white, square, at 2,000 px with the subject filling 85%; the product photo guide walks through it.
Signatures and logos: no AI needed
Ink on paper and flat-colour logos are better handled by simple image processing than by a neural network. Signature mode converts the scan to greyscale and compares each pixel with its neighbourhood, so a shadow across the page does not become part of the signature, then recolours the ink. Logo mode flood-fills the background from the corners within a colour tolerance, so the inside of letters like O and A stays intact.
Formats and sizes
PNG is lossless and keeps transparency; use it for cut-outs, logos and signatures. WebP keeps transparency at a fraction of the size, and every current browser and most apps open it. JPG cannot be transparent, so a transparent background is filled with white. The free tier exports up to 1,000 pixels on the long edge, which is plenty for social media and most listings; HD & batch exports the full original resolution and lets you drop up to 50 images at once, processed one after another with the same settings and downloaded as a ZIP.
Passport and ID photos
It is tempting to fix a passport photo's background here, but most passport authorities, including Australia's, the United States' and Canada's, say edited or replaced backgrounds are not acceptable. The tool only offers the hand-off to the photo maker for documents whose rules permit a digitally produced plain background, and lists the rest as unavailable. For those, the answer is a retake against a plain light wall.