Remove the background from an image

Yes, and it is one of only two ImageUtility tools that does. A reduced copy - no larger than 1536 pixels on its long edge, re-encoded and stripped of metadata, without your filename - is sent to our server, which passes it to a background-removal service and gets the cut-out back. Your browser never talks to that service directly. Nothing is sent until you press the button on the disclosure, and if you decline there, your image is never transmitted at all. Cancelling after that button stops this page waiting for an answer; it cannot recall a copy that has already gone, and the page says so rather than claiming otherwise.

Not because it is too slow or too big - because of licensing. We built a complete local version and measured it against a quality bar written in advance, twice. The best model we can legally use for a commercial product is a portrait matting network whose weights are Apache-licensed, and on a held-out corpus of twenty photographs it failed outright on seven of them, including several where the subject was simply erased. The models that would pass are all trained on datasets whose terms prohibit commercial use, whatever licence the weights themselves carry. We published the corpus, the criteria and every result rather than quietly shipping the weaker version.

No. Only the cut-out shape is computed remotely; it comes back as a transparency mask, which is then applied to your original file here in your browser. Your original file is not uploaded - only the reduced copy is - so the download is at its full resolution and its own colours. The mask is sharpened against your full-resolution image on the way, because scaling a small mask up naively is what makes hair look like a grey smudge.

ImageUtility does not store it. It exists in server memory for the duration of one request, is never written to disk or to a database, and is never logged. The background-removal service keeps it under their own policy, not ours - including whether they use it to improve their own models. The exact wording of their policy, and a link to it, is on the disclosure you have to read before anything is sent. We describe their policy rather than promising anything on their behalf.

The tool checks the result before showing it to you and says so when it looks broken - a subject that has been mostly erased, a mask with holes through it, or edges too unclear to cut. You still get the file, because you can see it and judge it yourself, but it is presented as something to check rather than as a success. Hair against a similar-coloured background and thin objects like wire or mesh are the usual hard cases.

You can put the subject on a solid colour, which is what most product listings and profile photos actually need, and switching colours costs nothing - the cut-out is already on your device, so changing it sends nothing and makes no new request. There is no background image replacement, because that is a compositing tool rather than a cut-out tool and it would need its own page.

Not here. Every other bulk tool on ImageUtility is free to run because your device does the work; this one costs money per image and sends each one to a third party, so processing a folder in one click would be an easy way to spend a lot and share a lot without noticing. One image, one explicit decision.