Elconvo

Free, open source, and private: everything happens on your Mac. Files are never uploaded. Works on Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

How to use it

Do this	And you get
⇧ Shift + drag any file, anywhere	A wheel of output formats around the pointer. Drop on one; the converted copy lands beside the original.
⌥ Option + ⇧ Shift + drag	The wheel fills with tools for that kind of file (compress, crop, trim, metadata…). Press or release ⌥ mid-drag to switch.
Drag several files or a folder	The centre shows their total size; tools like Join, Merge, Collage and Size & Info work on all of them at once.
Drop on Copy	The files go on the clipboard. Paste them anywhere with ⌘V.
Right-click in Finder ▸ Services	Elconvo: Size & Info and Elconvo: Show Metadata, no dragging needed.
Menu bar icon ▸ Open Elconvo	A batch window: drop in lots of files, pick formats, quality, size and output folder.

Elconvo lives in the menu bar and offers to start at login, so the wheel is always there.

What it converts

Kind	To
Images (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PSD, SVG, ICO, EXR…)	JPEG, PNG, HEIC, AVIF, WebP, TIFF, GIF, BMP, JPEG 2000, PSD, TGA, EXR, HDR, EPS, WBMP, SVG, ICO, ICNS, PDF
RAW photos (Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Leica, DNG…)	DNG, 16-bit TIFF/PNG, JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, WebP, PSD
Audio (MP3, WAV, AIFF, M4A, FLAC, OGG, Opus, WMA…)	M4A (AAC or Apple Lossless), MP3, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, CAF, AAC, OGG, Opus, WMA, MMF, iPhone ringtone (M4R)
Video (MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, WebM, AVI…)	MP4, MOV (H.264 or HEVC), M4V, WebM, MKV, AVI, WMV, FLV, MPG, 3GP, 3G2, animated GIF, audio only
Documents (Word, RTF, HTML, Markdown, ODT, text)	PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, HTML, plain text, web archive
PDF (and Illustrator .ai)	Word (keeps headings, lists and real tables), images per page, text, RTF. Scanned pages are read with on-device OCR.
3D models (OBJ, STL, PLY, 3MF, USDZ, USD, Alembic)	STL, 3MF, OBJ, PLY, USDZ, USDA
Subtitles	SRT ↔ WebVTT, plain text
Spreadsheets	Excel (XLSX, XLSM), OpenDocument (ODS), and old Excel (XLS) or Apple Numbers files via the Numbers app → CSV, TSV, JSON, HTML table, PDF, XLSX. A workbook with several sheets becomes a folder with one file per sheet; dates stay dates
Data	JSON ↔ CSV ↔ TSV ↔ Property list, and any of them → XLSX
Archives (ZIP, 7z, RAR, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, ISO, CAB…)	Extract, or pack any files and folders into ZIP, 7z, TAR.GZ, TAR.XZ, TAR.BZ2, TAR

Tools (⌥⇧-drag)

• Compress and Fit Size: shrink images, video, audio and PDFs, or aim for an exact size ("2 MB").
• Crop (photos and video), Adjust (exposure, contrast, saturation, warmth, highlights, shadows, sharpness, vignette, rotate, flip), Markup (pen, arrows, boxes, text, pixelate, black-out, auto-redact faces and text).
• Remove background from photos and from video (people and animals): transparent .mov, blurred background, or green screen, with the sound kept.
• Read QR / barcodes, Make PDF and Collage from images.
• Trim, Snapshot, Split video and audio; 2× / ½ speed, Mute, Join; audio Normalize, Mono / Stereo.
• PDF: Organize pages (drag to reorder, rotate, delete), Split, Rotate, Merge.
• Metadata: read everything (GPS location is flagged), edit title / author / copyright / description / keywords, or strip it all.
• Translate (PDFs): opens them in Elingo, the free companion app, to fill in and sign a form in any language beside a live translation. Several PDFs open together with a file list.
• Rename and Batch Rename: rename one file, or many at once (replace text, add text, name + number, change case) with a live before → after preview.
• Size & Info: true size of files and folders, largest first, plus MD5 / SHA-1 / SHA-256 / SHA-512 / CRC-32 checksums with a paste-to-verify box.

Edits are always saved as a new file beside the original, never over it. The one exception is the metadata editor's Save Changes, which writes the new tags into the file itself.

Install

1. Download Elconvo.dmg, open it and drag Elconvo into Applications.
2. The app isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID yet, so the first time you open it macOS will refuse. Go to System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway. You only do this once.
3. Say yes to Open at Login so the wheel is always available.
4. When it offers Full Disk Access, click Open Settings and switch Elconvo on (Touch ID). That one switch replaces the separate prompts for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, iCloud Drive and every USB drive. Later: menu bar icon ▸ Grant Full Disk Access.

Optional extras (free)

Elconvo uses what comes with macOS. A few formats light up when these are installed:

Install	Unlocks
brew install ffmpeg	MP3, OGG, Opus, WMA, MMF; WebM, MKV, AVI, WMV, FLV, MPG, 3GP; exact-size video
brew install imagemagick	WebP, HDR, EPS, WBMP output
Adobe DNG Converter	RAW → DNG

Restart Elconvo after installing them.

A note on RAW → RAW: no tool can turn a Sony ARW into a Canon CR3 or Nikon NEF. Those formats are closed and only cameras write them. DNG is the open RAW format that Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One and Apple Photos all read, and it keeps the full RAW data.

Build from source

Needs only the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install), no Xcode.

./build.sh      # builds build/Elconvo.app (Apple Silicon + Intel)
./package.sh    # builds and wraps it in build/Elconvo.dmg

package.sh signs and notarizes the DMG when DEVELOPER_ID and NOTARY_PROFILE are set (see the script).

The app also has a command-line mode, handy for scripts:

Elconvo.app/Contents/MacOS/Elconvo --convert photo.heic jpg
Elconvo.app/Contents/MacOS/Elconvo --tool compress video.mov

File	What's in it
Sources/main.swift	Formats, the conversion engine, the batch window, app shell
Sources/Wheel.swift	The drag wheel and progress windows
Sources/Tools.swift	The ⌥⇧ tools, crop / trim / metadata windows
Sources/Spreadsheet.swift	Excel / ODS reading and writing
Sources/Studio.swift	Size & Info, Adjust, Markup, PDF organizer, metadata editing, 3D
Sources/PDFWord.swift	PDF → Word that keeps headings, lists and tables
Sources/VideoMatte.swift	Video background removal
Sources/Rename.swift	Rename and Batch Rename
Sources/Donate.swift	The once-a-month "enjoying it?" note
Sources/Updater.swift	Daily check for a newer release on GitHub

Support

Elconvo is free and made by one person. If it saves you time, a coffee on Ko-fi keeps it going. The app asks once a month whether you like it, and stops asking for a year if you've donated (in Elxplorer too).

Once a day Elconvo checks GitHub for a newer release and offers to download it (or use Check for Updates… in the menu bar menu).

Made by Elad Itzkin · ai.itzkin.com · elad.itzkin.com. MIT licensed.