Airplane, subway tunnel, spotty café Wi-Fi, a locked-down office network — plenty of moments call for editing an image with no connection. Most online tools die the instant the network drops, because they were doing the work on a server the whole time. A browser-based tool doesn't have that problem: if the code runs on your device, the internet is optional.
Here's precisely which image tasks work offline on IMG.DIY, what carries a small asterisk, and the one tool that genuinely can't.
Why some image tools work offline and others don't
It comes down to where the processing happens.
A server-based tool uploads your file, edits it on a remote machine, and sends it back. No connection means no server means no edit. These tools are dead in airplane mode.
A browser-based tool does the work locally using the Canvas API and WebAssembly — technology already built into your browser. The image is decoded, edited, and re-encoded inside the tab. Because none of that needs a network, these tools keep working with the Wi-Fi off.
IMG.DIY goes a step further by being a PWA (Progressive Web App). A service worker caches the pages and tools after your first visit. So it's not just that the editing runs locally — the tool pages themselves load offline. Open them once with internet, and they're yours in airplane mode after that.
What works fully offline on IMG.DIY
Once you've visited the site, this whole set runs with zero internet:
- Compress — shrink JPG, PNG, and WebP files locally, batch them, download a ZIP.
- Convert — change between formats like JPG, PNG, and WebP.
- Resize — set exact pixel dimensions or scale by percentage.
- Crop, rotate, watermark — the core editing trio.
- Image-to-PDF, collage, split-image, grid-crop — combine, tile, and slice.
- E-commerce resize, wallpaper resize, wallpaper maker — sized presets for shops and screens.
- EXIF viewer/remover, palette extractor, favicon generator, OG-image maker — utilities and metadata tools.
All of it, in airplane mode, with your files never leaving the device.
The one asterisk: background removal
The background remover works offline too — but only after a one-time model download. It uses an AI model to find the subject and cut out the background, and that model has to arrive on your device first (u2netp is about 4MB; the higher-quality silueta is about 43MB). Do that once with a connection. From then on, the cutout runs offline like everything else, entirely in your browser. What downloaded was the model, not your photo — your images are never uploaded.
The one tool that needs internet: page-qa
Being honest about limits matters. The page-qa tool genuinely requires a connection, because it calls Google's PageSpeed API to analyze a live web page's performance. That's a lookup against an external service, not local image processing, so there's nothing to cache — it can't run in airplane mode. Every other image tool on IMG.DIY can.
How to verify offline support yourself
Don't take my word for it. Test any tool:
- Load the tool's page once with internet on.
- Switch your device to airplane mode.
- Try to edit an image with the resize tool or any other.
If it still works, the processing is local — and, as a bonus, that's proof your file isn't being uploaded. A tool that runs offline is a tool that can't secretly ship your photo to a server. Offline capability and privacy are the same property viewed from two angles.