About RAWSnap

A free RAW developer that runs in your browser, plus practical guides for people who shoot RAW.

What RAWSnap is

RAWSnap is a free RAW photo developer that runs entirely inside your web browser. You open a camera RAW file — Sony ARW, Canon CR3 or CR2, Nikon NEF, Fujifilm RAF, Olympus/OM System ORF, Panasonic RW2, Pentax PEF or Adobe DNG — adjust it with a preset and a handful of sliders, and save a JPG you can share anywhere. Nothing is uploaded: the file is read and processed on your own computer or phone.

Beyond plain conversion, RAWSnap gives you tools most online converters don't: a split view that compares your edit with the JPEG your camera embedded in the RAW file, a live RGB histogram with a clipping warning, the shooting information stored in the file (lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, capture time and RAW bit depth), and fixed-ratio crops (1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 9:16, 16:9) that save at exactly 1080 pixels wide for social media.

Alongside the converter we publish practical guides on the things people actually run into when they start shooting RAW: why the files look flat, how to fix white balance, how far you can pull back highlights, which export size to use for Instagram or print, and how to keep years of RAW files safe. The guides are written to be useful whether or not you ever use our tool.

Why it exists

Shooting RAW is the single easiest way to get better pictures out of a camera you already own — but the moment you try to share one, you hit a wall. Phones, messaging apps and most websites can't open RAW files. The usual answers are a paid subscription editor, a camera maker's desktop program, or an online converter that uploads your private photos to someone else's server and sends you back a watermarked result.

RAWSnap was built to remove that wall for the common case: "I have a RAW file, I want a good-looking JPG, and I don't want to install anything or hand my photos to a stranger." It is deliberately small. If you need lens corrections, local masks or a full catalog, a dedicated editor is the right tool — our editor comparison explains which one fits which kind of photographer.

How it works

The decoding engine is LibRaw, a long-standing open-source library for reading RAW files from hundreds of camera models. We compile it to WebAssembly so it runs at near-native speed in any modern browser. When you open a file:

1. The RAW data is read from your disk into the browser's memory — it is never sent over the network.
2. LibRaw demosaics the sensor data, applies the white balance your camera recorded, and converts it to the standard sRGB color space.
3. A half-resolution preview is shown so sliders respond instantly; your adjustments are applied on top.
4. When you export, the file is decoded again at full resolution, your settings are applied, and a JPEG is encoded at 92% quality — either full size or resized to 2048 pixels on the long edge for phones.

Some phone RAW files (for example Apple ProRAW and Samsung Expert RAW) store data in a way the decoder can't fully develop. In that case RAWSnap falls back to the full-size JPEG preview embedded inside the file and tells you so. The phone RAW guide covers this in detail.

What we promise — and what we don't

• Your photos stay on your device. There is no upload step, no server-side processing, and no account. You can verify this by opening a file and then disconnecting from the internet — editing and saving keep working.
• Free, with no watermark. The converter is supported by advertising on the site. Ads never touch your images.
• Honest limits. Processing happens on 8-bit data after decoding, so very extreme edits can show banding, and the exported JPEG doesn't carry your camera's EXIF metadata. We say this plainly in the guides instead of hiding it.

Editorial approach

Every guide on this site is written for photographers by people who shoot RAW themselves. We stick to well-established, verifiable information — sensor and file-format behaviour, color-space basics, export conventions — and we don't publish invented test numbers or rankings. Example images are real conversions of a sample Sony ARW file made with RAWSnap, labeled with the exact settings used. When a platform's recommendations change (social-media image sizes, for instance), we update the page and its date.

Found a mistake, or a camera whose files don't open? Please tell us — corrections are the most useful email we get.

Contact

RAWSnap is an independent project based in South Korea. You can reach us at ovov23@gmail.com; see the contact page for what to include in a bug report.