Lemon

I kept uploading files to random websites just to turn a HEIC into a JPG. A photo of a passport, a contract, a screen recording of something unreleased, handed to a stranger's server so it could hand back a smaller file. Every converter app I tried wanted me to open it first, pick a file, pick a format, pick a destination, wait. The file was already under my cursor in Finder. That is where the conversion should happen.

See it run

How it works

• Start dragging any file in Finder and hold Option. A lemon bursts open under the pointer with a slice for each format that file can become.
• Drop it on a slice. The converted copy lands in the same folder, same name, new extension. Nothing is overwritten: if the name is taken it adds a number.
• Rest on More to see every action for that file type. Let go in the middle of the lemon, or anywhere else, to cancel.
• Photos: HEIC, JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, GIF and BMP to each other, plus compress, half size, rotate, flip, PDF and trace to SVG. Portrait photos stay upright and keep their date and location.
• PDFs: every page to PNG or JPG, pull the text out of scanned pages with Vision, split, merge, rotate and compress.
• Video and audio: MOV to MP4, clips to GIF, extract or mute the audio, and compress. Audio to M4A, WAV, FLAC or AIFF.
• Documents, folders and archives: Word, Markdown, RTF, HTML and text to PDF or Word, text read aloud to an audio file, zip a folder, a folder of photos into one PDF, and open zip, 7z, rar, tar, gz and xz.
• Drag a stack of files of the same kind to convert them all at once.
• Settings lets you choose which slices appear for each kind of file; the rest wait under More. There is also an optional right-click menu, off until you turn it on.
• The work is done by macOS itself, with ImageIO, PDFKit, AVFoundation and Vision, plus small bundled tools. The app contains no networking code at all, so nothing can leave your Mac even by accident. It works on a plane.

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