Background Remover
Cut the background out of a photo — AI on your device or colour key. No upload.
About this tool
Two methods, both on your device. Auto runs a real neural network in the browser to find the subject — a person, a pet, a product — and cut it out with a soft-edged mask. Colour key needs no model: click the background colour and it turns transparent, exact and instant. Export a transparent PNG, or drop in a white or black background. Free forever, no account, no upload.
How on-device AI removal works, and what it's honest about
The Auto mode runs U²-Net lite — an open-source salient-object segmentation network — inside your browser through ONNX Runtime. The first time you press the button it downloads the model (about 4.6 MB, from this site) and the runtime (about 10 MB, from a public CDN); after that both are cached and the tool works offline. Your photo is never transmitted: it is resized to the network's 320-pixel input in memory, the network predicts which pixels are subject, and that prediction is scaled back up as an alpha mask. Honest expectations: it's a small model chosen so the download stays reasonable, so clear subjects on distinct backgrounds cut cleanly while wispy hair, glass and cluttered scenes are where cloud services running far larger models still win — and the edge-softness slider exists because the boundary is a judgement call, not a certainty. The Colour-key mode is the better tool for product shots on white, logos and screenshots, where the background is genuinely one colour and a model would only guess. Finish the cutout with rounded corners, the resizer or a new backdrop, and see How to reduce image file size without wrecking it for why the transparent PNG is larger than the JPG you started with.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded to remove the background?
No. The neural network runs inside your browser; the only downloads are the model and its runtime (code, not your image), fetched once and cached. Load the page, press the button once, then go offline — it still works.
How good is it compared with remove.bg or Photoshop?
Honestly: good on clear subjects, weaker on fine hair, glass and busy backgrounds. It's a deliberately small model so the download stays ~15 MB; cloud services run models a hundred times larger on servers. For flat backgrounds, colour key is exact.
Why does the first use take a moment?
It's downloading the model (4.6 MB) and runtime (10 MB) and warming them up. Subsequent images take about a second on a laptop, a few on a phone; the files stay cached.
When should I use colour key instead of Auto?
Whenever the background is genuinely one colour — product photos on white, logos, screenshots, green screens. It removes exactly that colour with no guessing, and the tolerance slider handles slight shading.