What Araluma is
Araluma is a suite of free image tools, each one aimed at a single recurring task. The catalog covers cropping (round avatars, rectangle crops, social-media presets), converting between formats like PNG, JPG, WebP, and AVIF, compressing, removing backgrounds, resizing to exact dimensions, AI upscaling, and assembling images into a PDF. Most of these finish entirely inside your browser. A few send a single request to named infrastructure for work the browser still can’t match, and even those fall back to a local path silently if the server is out of reach. No signup, no watermark, no resolution cap.
The site exists because the alternatives, in our experience, get one of three things wrong: they upload everything to a server (whether or not the work needs one), they paywall basic operations, or they bury simple tools under intrusive ads. Araluma tries to do none of those, and we describe the actual data flow honestly rather than claim “100% client-side” when the cloud path is what gives you remove.bg-grade results.
Why we built it
The first version of Araluma launched in 2024 as a single tool, a circle crop for profile pictures, built to scratch a personal itch: the existing options either asked for an account or rendered the image at 256 pixels and offered a “Pro” upgrade for the original resolution. Neither felt acceptable for a one-line operation that every browser has been able to do natively for years.
The site grew from there, one tool at a time. Every addition answered a question we kept running into ourselves, “how do I shrink this PNG without losing transparency?”, “how do I strip the GPS coordinates from this photo before sharing?”, “how do I make a Discord avatar without installing software?”. The 2026 rebuild is the same project rewritten on modern web standards (Astro, WebAssembly, the Canvas API for the in-browser work, plus Cloudflare Workers and a small VPS for the handful of jobs where server-side encoders or AI models still beat the browser).
Who it’s for
Araluma is for anyone who needs to do a small, specific thing to an image and doesn’t want to install software, sign up for an account, or hand their photo to a generic uploader that retains it. The tools group into a few common categories:
- Cropping, round avatars for Discord, LinkedIn, Slack, or Instagram, plus rectangle and social-media-preset crops. Runs entirely in your browser, with export to transparent PNG, WebP, AVIF, or JPEG.
- Format conversion, swapping between PNG, JPG, WebP, and AVIF in either direction. Browser-side for most pairs, with the AVIF-output path handled by our compression service for encoder quality.
- Compression, with a live slider and side-by-side preview that runs in the browser via
canvas.toBlobso iteration stays instant, and a final download that sends your image once to our compression service for sharp-grade encoding. - Background removal, pulling a subject out of its background with AI. The default path sends your image once to a Cloudflare Worker running the BiRefNet model on Cloudflare’s edge GPUs (the same architecture remove.bg uses), with the staging copy auto-deleted within an hour. When the cloud is unreachable, it falls back transparently to an in-browser model (ONNX Runtime plus WebAssembly), with no upload at all on that path.
- Resizing, scaling an image to exact pixel dimensions entirely in your browser.
- AI upscaling, enlarging a small image while keeping detail. The default path uses a cloud super-resolution service, with a browser-based fallback when it isn’t available.
- PDF, turning one or more images into a single PDF document.
Common to all of them: no upload we keep, no account, no watermark. The server-touching tools document exactly what happens to your image, where, and for how long.
Our principles
Honest about the architecture
“Your photos stay on your device” is a marketing line we deliberately avoid, because it isn’t true on every path. The honest version is this: the cropping, resizing, PDF, and in-browser compression preview tools never send your image anywhere, and you can confirm that in the DevTools Network tab. The compression download, the default background-removal path, the AVIF-output conversions, and AI upscaling send your image exactly once to named infrastructure we operate, do their work, return the result, and then either auto-delete the staged copy or rely on a content-addressed cache that isn’t tied to you. We tell you which path a tool is on. We don’t pretend the cloud path doesn’t exist.
If you need a hard guarantee that bytes never leave your device for a particular job, the browser-only tools cover that today. The Background Remover also offers it through its WebAssembly fallback when you switch off the network.
Free should mean free
Every tool that exists today will stay free. We don’t watermark exports, we don’t cap resolution, we don’t require an account, and we don’t run interstitial ads. We may add a paid tier in the future to fund continued development, but if we do, it will only add new capability and will never gate anything that has already shipped.
Truthful copy
What we say a tool does and what the code actually does are the same thing. If a page says “Export as PNG, WebP, or JPEG”, you’ll find all three in the format picker. If it says “up to 4096 px”, that’s the real cap in code. If a tool’s default path is cloud-routed, the page says so, rather than claiming “all-in-browser” with a hidden asterisk. We keep an internal rule that copy and code ship in the same commit, precisely so this never drifts.
Accessibility from the start
Every page passes WCAG 2.2 AA contrast in both light and dark themes. Every interactive element is reachable by keyboard, carries a visible focus ring, and meets a minimum 24 by 24 CSS-pixel touch target. Screen-reader landmarks (header, main, footer, nav) are in place. The site is built so the experience for someone using a screen reader, a keyboard, or a small phone is not noticeably worse than for someone on a high-end desktop.
No tracking by default
The site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics for aggregate page-view counts. There are no tracking cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party analytics scripts. The full data flow, including the cloud paths, is described in the privacy policy.
How we stay free
Araluma’s static site runs on Cloudflare’s free tier, and the browser-only tools cost us essentially nothing per use because the work happens on your machine.
The server-touching tools carry a small but real cost:
- Background removal runs on Cloudflare’s image segmentation (free for the first several thousand transformations per month, and our typical month sits well below the ceiling), backed by an R2 bucket holding a few megabytes at any time, a Worker fielding tens of requests per day, and a KV namespace for rate-limiting.
- Compression download and AI upscaling route through a small Hostinger VPS and a cloud super-resolution service. A content-addressed cache amortizes most of the repeated work, so the marginal cost per request stays low.
As traffic grows, we plan to fund continued development with a single discreet ad below the tool, served by Google AdSense on tool pages only. The home page, satellite pages, and legal pages stay ad-free. That is the standard pattern free tools at scale use on the open web. We may layer an optional paid tier on top later for people who use the tools daily and want to support the project, but free use will stay free.
How to reach us
For questions, feedback, or bug reports, email support@araluma.com. We read every message and try to respond within five business days.
For privacy-related requests, see the privacy policy. For a technical look under the hood, see how it works.