Remove Background
Separate the subject from its background and download it as a transparent PNG — with the model running on your own device, so the picture is never uploaded.
What it does
Remove Background works on JPG, PNG and WEBP images and writes a new file; the one you dropped in is untouched. Cut the subject out, without uploading the photo.
When you need it
Usually because something downstream has an opinion: a profile photo that must be square, a marketplace that rejects anything over a certain width, a print that needs the right proportions, or a phone photo that arrived rotated.
Limits and caveats
Enlarging an image cannot add detail that was never captured, so scaling up softens it. Saving to a lossy format re-encodes the pixels, which is worth doing once rather than repeatedly on the same file. Everything happens in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.
How to remove background
- Drop the photo.
- Wait while the model runs on your device.
- Download it with a transparent or coloured background.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the photo uploaded?
- No, and that is the entire reason this exists. Every other free background remover sends your picture to a server. For a holiday snap that is a fair trade; for a passport, a payslip on a desk, a child, or a product nobody has announced yet, it is a stranger's disk drive — and the site rarely tells you which. Here the model is downloaded to you instead, so there is nothing to say about where the picture went.
- Why is the first run slow?
- It downloads about 18 MB the first time: the model and the runtime that executes it. After that your browser keeps them and the wait is only the few seconds the model itself takes. On a phone that is closer to ten seconds than to two.
- What is it bad at?
- Hair, fur, foliage, glass, smoke — anything whose edge is not really an edge. It uses the small 4.6 MB model, because the good one is 176 MB and no one should be asked to download that for one picture. It is also a saliency model: it finds what a person would say the picture is *of*, so a photo with no obvious subject gets an unconvincing answer, and it says so rather than handing back a blank file.
- Why does the result look like it has a white background?
- That is usually the viewer, not the file. A transparent PNG shows as white in most image previews. The preview here uses a checkerboard so you can see what is actually transparent.
- Do my files get uploaded?
- No. This tool runs entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.