The deal, stated plainly.

FormatOnce.com is operated by Black Sheep Digital Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 16989285, registered office 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom (“we”, “us”). “You” means anyone using the site. Full details are on the Imprint. By using the site you accept these terms; if you do not accept them, please do not use it.

FormatOnce provides six browser-based utilities: compressing an image to a target size, converting an image between formats, repairing and re-exporting CSV files, converting between CSV and JSON, validating and formatting JSON, and rasterising SVG to PNG, JPEG or WebP.

All of them run inside your own browser. We do not receive, store or process your file content on any server, which also means we cannot see what you did, cannot recover a file and cannot reproduce a problem for you from our side.

There is no registration, no login, no payment, no subscription and nothing for sale on this site. As nothing is sold, no charges, invoices or refunds arise from using the tools.

The tools are free to use today. We are not promising they will be free forever. If we ever offer something paid, it would be presented clearly as a separate offer, with its own terms, prices and cancellation and refund rights disclosed before you commit — and it would not change the basis on which you used the free tools before then.

The tools are deliberately bounded, and the limits are part of the service:

• Images up to 20 MB; text and SVG input up to 5 MB, including pasted text.
• Raster image output is capped at 40 megapixels. SVG rendering is capped at 8000 px per side and at 16 megapixels in total, whichever limit is reached first.
• Input and output formats depend on what your browser can decode and encode. JPEG, PNG and WebP are widely supported; AVIF input and some output formats are not available everywhere, and unavailable options are disabled rather than silently substituted.
• HEIC and HEIF are not supported: no decoder is bundled, and the site tells you so rather than failing obscurely.
• Very large or complex inputs are ultimately limited by your device’s memory and processing power.

File conversion is never neutral. Please read this before using an output as your only copy.

• Lossy compression. Hitting a target size in JPEG or WebP means discarding image detail, and quality is searched automatically to meet the target. PNG is lossless: there is no quality setting to reduce, so a PNG target is approached only by reducing the dimensions, and it may not be reachable at all, in which case the tool reports a failure instead of producing a file over the target.
• Metadata is stripped. Re-encoding an image through the browser’s canvas discards EXIF, GPS, colour profile and other embedded metadata. That is often desirable for privacy, but it is irreversible.
• Transparency. Converting to JPEG flattens transparent areas onto white, because JPEG has no alpha channel.
• CSV encoding and delimiters. We detect the delimiter and let you override it and the input encoding, and we export UTF-8 with a byte order mark so spreadsheets open it correctly. Values are preserved as text, but a spreadsheet application may still reinterpret a cell on import — leading zeros or long IDs can become numbers. To avoid that, import the column explicitly as text.
• Formula-like cells. Cells beginning with characters a spreadsheet treats as a formula are flagged, and the safe export escapes them by default to prevent CSV injection. You can choose to keep them literal, which is the right choice for data fidelity and the wrong one for opening the file in a spreadsheet you do not control.
• SVG. Input is sanitised, and SVGs containing scripts, event handlers, external or remote references, or constructs we cannot safely keep are rejected with an explanation rather than rendered in a changed form. Fonts referenced remotely are never fetched, so text may fall back to another font. Rendering results can differ between browsers.

Always keep your originals and check the output before relying on it, deleting a source file or sending a result to someone else.

You keep all rights in the files you open, paste and produce here. Using the site grants us no licence to your content of any kind, and there is nothing for such a licence to cover: we never receive it.

You are responsible for having the right to process the files you use — for example that they are yours, or that you have permission from whoever owns them or whose personal data they contain — and for using the outputs lawfully.

You agree not to:

• attack the site or the infrastructure serving it, including denial-of-service attempts, attempts to gain unauthorised access, or probing beyond good-faith security research reported to us privately;
• use automated means to hammer the site in a way that degrades it for other people, or attempt to bypass the technical limits above;
• introduce malware, or use the site to prepare or distribute unlawful material;
• misrepresent the site as your own, or remove or obscure attribution and licence notices.

Because processing happens on your device, we have no ability to inspect, moderate, block or remove the content you work with, and we make no claim to. Where a breach affects the site or our infrastructure, we may take technical measures to protect it.

We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, revocable right to use the site for its intended purpose, personally or at work. The site’s name, design, text and original code remain ours.

The site is built with third-party open source software, which remains the property of its authors and is used under its own licences. Nothing in these terms removes or overrides the rights those licences grant you in respect of those components.

We aim to keep FormatOnce available and working, but this is a free service and we do not promise uninterrupted availability. We may change, suspend, add or withdraw tools and features, or discontinue the site, at any time.

We may also update these terms. Changes apply from the date they are published and to your use of the site after that date; we will not apply changed terms retrospectively to past use. The date at the top shows the current version. If a change matters to you, stop using the site — there is nothing to cancel and no account to close.

The site links to the other Once tools and occasionally to external references. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content, availability or practices. A link is not an endorsement, and their terms and privacy notices apply once you are there.

The tools are provided free of charge and “as is”. We do not warrant that a tool will meet a particular requirement, that output will be suitable for a specific purpose, that processing will be error-free, or that every browser will produce identical results. Where the law implies terms or guarantees that cannot be excluded, they apply and nothing here limits them.

The sections above set out the known limitations of each tool, so that you can judge whether an output is suitable for your purpose before you rely on it.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including your statutory rights as a consumer.

Subject to that, we are liable for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach of these terms or of our failure to use reasonable care and skill. Loss or damage is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if it was contemplated by both of us at the time you used the site.

Please keep your original files and check an output before you rely on it, delete a source file or send a result to someone else. If you do not, and loss results from that rather than from anything we did, we are not responsible for it.

Business users only. If you use the site for the purposes of your trade, business, craft or profession, then to the extent permitted by law we are not liable to you for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings, business interruption or loss of business opportunity, or for indirect or consequential loss, in each case arising from your use of the site. This paragraph does not apply to consumers.

If you use the site as a consumer rather than for business, you have statutory rights that these terms cannot reduce. Nothing here affects them, and any provision that would conflict with a mandatory consumer protection applying to you does not apply to that extent. The business-only exclusions in the liability section do not apply to you.

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer habitually resident in another country, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the law of your country of residence, and you may also bring proceedings in the courts of your own country. There is no arbitration clause, no class action waiver and no jury trial waiver in these terms.

Complaints go to hello@blacksheepdigital.co. Tell us what happened and what you would like us to do; we will look into it and reply as soon as we reasonably can. Privacy complaints can also go to a supervisory authority, as explained in the Privacy Notice.

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. A delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. These terms, together with the Privacy Notice and the Cookies page, are the whole agreement between us about your use of the site.