What's new: eighteen tools, faster pages, and a guides section

A busy month. Eighteen new tools, a section of guides, and a performance change that took a third off the JavaScript every page loads.

Privacy tools that make the point

The EXIF viewer and remover is the one worth opening first. Every photo your phone takes carries a block of metadata: the camera, the exposure, the date, and very often the exact coordinates where it was taken, accurate to a few metres. That data survives being emailed, put in a document, or uploaded to most file hosts.

It strips that metadata by removing whole marker segments from the JPEG byte stream rather than redrawing the image through a canvas. The distinction matters more than it sounds: a canvas round-trip does clear the metadata, and quietly recompresses your photograph while doing it. Cutting the segments out leaves the compressed image data bit-for-bit identical, so the privacy operation costs you nothing in quality.

And it runs in your browser, which is the only defensible arrangement for this particular job — a tool that asks you to upload a photo in order to remove its location data has already done the thing you were trying to prevent.

For developers

Six additions, three of which involve arithmetic that is easy to get quietly wrong:

• Subnet calculator — network, broadcast, host range and usable addresses for any IPv4 block. It gets /31 and /32 right, which the usual minus-two rule does not: a /31 has no network or broadcast address at all, and both of its addresses are usable.
• Cron expression builder — reads a schedule back in plain English and shows exactly when it will next fire. It is explicit about the rule almost everyone gets wrong: when both day fields are restricted, cron treats them as OR, not AND.
• HMAC generator — for signing and for checking webhook signatures, verified against the published RFC 4231 test vectors.
• JSON to TypeScript, a SQL formatter and YAML to JSON.

For images

Alongside the EXIF tool: a social media resizer that crops one image to every platform size at once — with an anchor control, because a centre crop from landscape to a story routinely takes the top off someone's head. Plus rotate and flip and image to Base64.

Guides

There is now a guides section: seven pieces answering the questions that come before the tool. Which image format to use, what size a social post should be, how to get a file under a limit, and what actually happens to a file you put into an online tool.

That last one is the one to read if you have ever wondered whether a free converter was uploading your documents. It explains how to check — including a fifteen-second test that cannot be faked.

Faster pages

The site was shipping about 80,000 words of explanatory copy to your browser as JavaScript. It had already been rendered into the HTML, and no script ever read a word of it — it was simply attached to the same objects the search palette needed for names and keywords.

Moving it out cut the JavaScript on a first visit from 363KB to 226KB. Nothing about the pages changed; there is just a good deal less to download before they work.