About this site

TabOtter is a small collection of tools that run inside your browser rather than on someone else's computer. It is built and run by Richard Bailey, a software engineer in the United Kingdom.

Why it works this way

Search for a way to convert a photo or split a PDF and almost every result asks you to upload the file first. That is a strange thing to have become normal. It means handing a stranger your passport scan, your bank statement or your family photographs, and then trusting a paragraph of legal text about what happens to them next.

Browsers stopped needing that years ago. They can decode images, read PDFs and process large amounts of data on their own, quickly, using hardware you have already paid for. Every tool here is built on that. What you put in is read by the page you are looking at, worked on by your own processor, and handed back. At no point does it cross the network.

The practical test is simple, and I would encourage anyone to try it: open your browser's developer tools (F12), watch the network panel, and use a tool. Nothing carrying your file is sent. That is not a promise about my conduct, which you have no reason to take on trust. It is a property of how the thing is built.

The name

Tab and otter. An otter that lives in your browser tab and does the fiddly jobs. Otters are also, for what it is worth, one of the few animals that use tools without being asked to.

How it is paid for

There is no charge, no account and nothing to subscribe to. The intention is to cover hosting and time through advertising. At the time of writing no ads run on this site; when they do, the privacy page will be updated before they appear rather than afterwards, and you will be asked for consent where the law requires it.

There is no paid tier planned, and no plan to gate a tool behind an email address. There is no data to sell either: the files never reach me, so there would be nothing to sell even if I wanted to.

How it is built

The site is static: HTML files on a content delivery network, with no application server and no database. Each tool is a small piece of TypeScript that runs in the page, with the heavy work moved off the main thread so the interface stays responsive. Nothing is stored about you because there is nowhere to store it.

Getting in touch

Corrections, bug reports and suggestions for tools are all welcome; see the contact page. If a tool has given you a wrong answer I would genuinely like to know; it is the most useful message I can receive.