What Tuul is
It started with security camera recordings. Recorders save footage in their own formats, and getting a clip onto a phone or into an email usually means installing unfamiliar software or uploading private footage to a stranger's server.
Tuul does it in a web page instead. There are 29 tools so far, for CCTV recordings, videos, sound and photos. They're free, with no account, no sign-up and no limit on how many files you add.
Who makes it
Tuul is made by taser.dev in Istanbul, Türkiye. Questions and reports go to the address under Contact below.
How the tools work
When you open a tool, its code loads into your browser like any web page. When you add a file, your browser reads it from your device, the tool works on it there, and the result is saved straight back to your device. There's no upload, no queue and no copy on a server.
Video tools use FFmpeg, the open-source media library behind most video software, compiled to WebAssembly so it can run inside a web page. Your browser downloads it (about 32 MB) from the jsDelivr network the first time you use a video tool. Where possible the video is copied as it is rather than re-encoded, which keeps the quality identical and makes conversion fast. Image tools use your browser's own image decoders, plus a HEIC decoder for iPhone photos in browsers that can't open them.
Check it yourself
You don't have to take our word for it that nothing is uploaded:
- Open a tool, then open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac) and choose the Network tab.
- Add a file and let it convert.
- Watch the list of requests. You'll see the tool's own code and, for video tools, the FFmpeg engine the first time. While your file converts, the list stays quiet: no request carries your file, however big it is.
On the live site you may also see one small usage count when a job finishes. It says which tool ran, the format, a rough size and how long it took, never the file's name or contents. The privacy page has the details.
How the tools are tested
Every change is tested before it goes live. Automated tests cover the parts that can be checked in code, such as recognising what a file really is, reading the recording time from CCTV files and finding every place a photo keeps its location. Then the tools are run in a real browser on a set of sample files: recordings from Dahua and Hikvision recorders, iPhone HEIC photos, photos with GPS data, and files that are cut off, renamed or not what they claim to be.
The site is also reviewed regularly for anything confusing or broken, from wording to accessibility, and what turns up goes into the next round of fixes. If a file of yours doesn't convert, a note about it (the tool, the camera or app it came from, and the message you saw) is the most useful report there is.
Open-source licences
Video tools run FFmpeg through ffmpeg.wasm (GPL 2.0 or later). HEIC photos are decoded with libheif and libde265 through libheif-js (LGPL 3.0), loaded as a separate file only when a HEIC photo needs it. ZIP files are made with fflate and photo metadata is read with exifr (both MIT).
PDFs are made with pdf-lib as maintained by pdfme (MIT), loaded with the first PDF. PNG files are optimised with Oxipng (MIT), compiled to WebAssembly by jSquash (Apache 2.0), and their colours are reduced with a port of the quantiser in UPNG.js by Photopea (MIT); both load with the first PNG.
Contact
Questions, a file that won't convert, or a tool you'd like to see? Write to contact@taser.dev.