Remove Background

How Remove Background works

Add a photo and the tool finds the main subject, a person, a product, a pet, and makes everything around it transparent. Save the result as a transparent PNG to place on any design, or put the subject on a clean white or coloured background, saved as a JPG, for shop listings and profile pictures.

The work is done by ormbg, an open-source segmentation model released under the Apache 2.0 licence, running in your browser through Transformers.js. The photo is analysed on your own device and never uploaded, which matters for pictures of people, children and unreleased products. The model, about 42 MB, downloads from Hugging Face the first time you use the tool and is cached for next time.

Removal takes a few seconds per photo because it runs on your own processor: about 9 seconds on a recent laptop in our tests, and longer on older phones. The result is saved at the photo's full resolution. Edges are kept soft where the model is unsure, such as around hair and fur, so the cut-out looks natural rather than jagged.

It works best when there is a clear subject in front of a background: a person against a wall or sky, a product on a table, an animal in a garden. It works poorly when the whole picture is the subject, such as a close-up of a flower that fills the frame, where parts of the subject can come out partly see-through. Check the result before using it.

Remove Background options explained

When to use it

Remove backgrounds to make product photos for Amazon, eBay, Etsy or your own shop, to create profile pictures and ID-style photos on a plain background, to cut out a person or object for a poster, slide or social media post, or to make stickers and logos from photos.

Photograph the subject against a plain, contrasting background with even light. The clearer the separation in the photo, the cleaner the cut-out.

About the background remover

Background removal is a job for a machine learning model: it has to decide, pixel by pixel, what belongs to the subject. This tool uses ormbg, an open-source model built on the ISNet architecture for separating a subject from its surroundings, and Transformers.js, Hugging Face's library for running such models in a browser with WebAssembly. Running the model locally is slower than sending the photo to a cloud service, but it means the photo is never uploaded, there is no daily limit and nothing costs money per image. The model is predicted at 1024 by 1024 pixels and scaled back to the size of your photo, so large photos keep their full resolution.

Remove Background troubleshooting

Parts of the subject are see-through

The model was unsure where the subject ends. Use a photo where the subject stands out from its background, or crop closer to it first.

A bit of background is left

Small patches that look like the subject, such as a shadow or an object touching it, can remain. Crop them away or retouch them in an editor.

It takes a long time

The model runs on your device. The first use also downloads it, about 42 MB. Later photos are faster, and a computer is quicker than a phone.

How to use Remove Background, step by step

1. Press "Choose photos" or drag files onto the box.
2. Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
3. Press "Remove background". The work happens on your device.
4. Save the result with its download button.

Is it safe to do this online?

With most online tools, "online" means your file is uploaded to a company's server, processed there and kept for a while before it is deleted. Here it is not. The page downloads the tool's code to your browser, and your file is read and processed inside the tab on your own device. It is never sent to TapToConvert or anyone else.

You can check this yourself: once the page and its engine have loaded, turn off Wi-Fi and the tool still works. That also means there is no queue, no daily limit and no file size cap set by a server; the only limit is the memory your browser gives a single tab.