Remove the Background from a Photo
The subject kept, the background gone, by a neural network running in this tab.
Runs entirely in your browser
Loading the tool…
Drag the line to compare with the original.
A sample is in. Choose your own, or drop it on the picture.
Crisp for objects and logos, soft for hair and fur.
Saved the way WhatsApp asks: 512 × 512, WebP, a transparent background, under 100 KB.
Your photo is opened by this page and never uploaded. The background is found by a small neural network running in this tab, so the page keeps working with the network off.
Choose a photo and the subject is cut out of it: the product, the person, the pet, the thing in the middle of the picture. Save it with a transparent background as a PNG, ready to drop into a slide, a listing or a design, or put it on white, on a colour of your choice, or on a blurred copy of its own background, the look of a photo taken with a wide-open lens.
Every other background remover uploads your photo to a server and sends the cut-out back. This one does not. A small neural network, U²-Net, runs in this tab, compiled to WebAssembly, and the page is served with a rule that forbids it from opening a connection to anywhere: switch the network off after it loads and it works the same. It takes a few seconds on a laptop and a little longer on a phone.
The network sees the photo at 320 pixels across, so its outline is then fitted to the photo's own edges at full size, and the colour of the old background is taken out of the edge pixels, so a subject lifted off grass has no green fringe and one lifted off a white wall no halo. Edges sets how hard the outline is: crisp for objects and logos, soft for hair and fur.
It works best on one clear subject against a background that is different from it: products, people, animals, cars, food. A small network can leave a patch of background between bicycle spokes or take the tip of an ear, and that is what the touch-up brushes are for: Erase paints away what should go, Restore paints back what should stay, and the cut-out is redone around the strokes. Drag the line across the picture to compare it with the original.
How to use it
- Choose a photo, or drop it on the picture. It is never uploaded.
- Wait a few seconds while the subject is found, on your device.
- Pick a background: none, white, a colour, or the photo blurred.
- Use Erase and Restore for anything it got wrong, and Edges for how soft the outline is.
- Download as PNG for transparency, or JPG on a background. Crop to the subject if you want it trimmed.
Questions
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The network that finds the subject is part of this page, a few megabytes of WebAssembly and weights, and it runs in your browser. The page is served with a security policy that forbids it from opening a network connection at all, so your photo cannot leave the device, and the page keeps working offline once loaded.
How do I get a transparent background?
Leave Background on None and download as PNG: the checkerboard you see is where the picture will be transparent. JPG has no transparency, so saving as JPG puts the cut-out on white, or on the background you chose.
How good is it?
Very good on a clear subject against a different background: products, people, animals, objects. It is a small network, chosen so that it can run in the page, and the large ones that services run on their servers do better on fine hair, glass and busy scenes. Where it misses, Erase and Restore fix it in a few strokes, and the cut-out is redone around them.
What do Erase and Restore do?
They correct the cut-out by hand. Choose Erase and paint over anything that should not be there, a patch of floor, a gap between fingers; choose Restore and paint over anything that was cut off. When you lift the brush the cut-out is redone with your corrections, edges cleaned and all. Undo takes back the last stroke.
Why are the edges clean and not fringed?
Because the colour of the old background is taken out of them. Pixels along an outline are part subject and part background, and cut out as they are they keep a tint of what was behind: green from grass, white from a wall. Each edge pixel's colour is worked out again as it would be over nothing, using fast foreground estimation, so it sits cleanly on any new background.
Can I put it on a white background for a product listing?
Yes: choose White and download as JPG, which is what most marketplaces ask for. Crop to the subject trims the empty space round it. For a colour, choose Colour and pick it.
How long does it take?
A few seconds on a laptop, a little more on a phone, whatever the photo's size, since the network always looks at it at 320 pixels across; the edge work after it is quick. Very large photos are scaled to sixteen million pixels first, so a phone has the memory for them.
Opened for one job
The same background remover, opened on what one kind of picture needs:
Your data stays on your device
Everything above runs inside your browser as WebAssembly compiled from Rust. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or stored on a server. You can load this page once, go offline, and it still works.
This page makes no requests at all, to anywhere. That is not a promise in the copy: it is a Content-Security-Policy header your browser enforces, and connect-src on it is none. Open the network tab and watch nothing happen.