Media, Files & Diagrams

An editor built for pixel art and animation, with onion skinning, a frame timeline and sprite sheet export. Unlike a general painting program every tool snaps to the pixel grid, so anti-aliasing never appears where you did not ask for it.

Turns a voice note into structured text — summary, bullets, action items — rather than a raw transcript. For thinking aloud on the move and organising afterwards.

A resource list for creative coding — programming to express rather than to function.

A resource list for FFmpeg, recording, converting and streaming audio/video. Unlike the FFmpeg docs, it gathers command examples, GUIs and library wrappers per language.

A list of plugins and resources for VLC, the cross-platform media player. Unlike general media-player lists, it focuses on VLC and libVLC alone: plugins, language bindings, projects built on top.

Modelling, texturing, rigging, simulation, rendering and video editing in one package. Against Maya or 3ds Max it is free, and it keeps the entire pipeline in a single program so nothing is lost in file handoffs.

Turns a snippet into a shareable image with theme, window chrome and line numbers under your control. Unlike a screenshot the result is reproducible and legible.

The online edition of draw.io, saving to Drive, OneDrive or local disk rather than keeping your file on its own server.

A PDF alternative for scanned documents producing much smaller files at the same quality. You meet it often in older archives, so it is worth knowing what it is.

A free tool for flowcharts and diagrams. Unlike Lucidchart it is entirely free and lets you keep diagrams in your own repository or cloud.

A hand-drawn-style whiteboard. Looking deliberately rough is functional rather than stylistic — it stops a draft architecture being mistaken for a finished one.

A font creation and editing program that converts between TTF, OTF and WOFF and lets you work on glyph hinting. Unlike an online font converter, you can get at the glyphs themselves.

A full-featured image editor that is the open-source alternative to Photoshop. Unlike paid tools it is free and extensible with plugins.

Merge, split, compress and convert. Unlike desktop PDF tools it needs no installation; be careful with sensitive documents — the file is uploaded to a server, and a local tool may be the better call.

A vector editor that uses SVG as its native format. Against Illustrator, the file is clean SVG ready for the web — no export step in between, and you can hand-edit the source.

A painting program for digital art and concept work, with a strong brush engine and frame-by-frame animation. Unlike GIMP it was built for drawing rather than photo editing, and brush latency and stabilisation are tuned accordingly.

Cuts and joins video without re-encoding, working on keyframe boundaries. Against a normal editor the operation takes seconds and loses no quality — trimming the head and tail off an hour of footage no longer means opening a timeline.

An online tool for diagrams and flowcharts with team collaboration. Compared with draw.io its team and integration features are stronger, while the free tier is limited.

Markdown presentation ecosystem that compiles plain text files into HTML, PDF, and PowerPoint decks via CSS themes; keeps slides version-controlled in Git unlike drag-and-drop slide editors.

Dumps the technical identity of a video or audio file: codec, bitrate, frame rate, colour space, container details. Unlike a player’s properties dialog it goes to stream level, which makes it the source of truth when something will not play.

A tool generating flowcharts and diagrams from text — “Markdown for diagrams”. Unlike drawing programs you embed the diagram as code and keep it in version control.

Generates diagrams from text; GitHub and GitLab render Mermaid natively. Unlike drawing tools such as draw.io the source is plain text, so it lives in version control with a readable diff.

A real-time, infinite whiteboard for diagrams and brainstorming. Unlike diagram tools such as draw.io it is free-form — sticky notes, sketches and templates suited to running team workshops.

Browser-based piano-roll sequencer for composing multi-track melodies and exporting MIDI files with zero setup; built for instant sketching rather than full DAW production.

Open-source, browser-based video editor that processes media locally on your device without uploading files; serves as a privacy-focused alternative to cloud-tied editors like CapCut.

A video editor running in the browser with the footage staying on device — an alternative that needs no installation and no upload to a cloud service.

An image editor in the browser that opens PSD, XCF, Sketch and XD files with their layers intact. Against GIMP it installs nothing and its PSD compatibility is genuinely good, which makes it the shortest path to opening a file someone sent you.

A pixel art and sprite animation editor in the browser. Against Aseprite it is free and needs no install; in exchange the layer and brush tools are thinner — enough for your first sprite.

A tool for drawing pixel art in the browser, with drawings shareable with the community. Unlike desktop tools such as Aseprite it needs no install; the trade-off is more limited animation and layer features.

Cloud-based image-editing tools that run in the browser. Unlike Photoshop it needs no install and has a free tier; in exchange, advanced features are limited.

Turns a snippet into a shareable image — a Carbon alternative with fewer knobs and a faster result.

Generates Sankey flow diagrams from text input, for energy, budget or funnel flows. Unlike general diagram tools it does one chart type, and takes its input as text rather than as drawing.

A screenshot and recording tool for Windows that chains post-capture steps: upload, shorten, OCR. What separates it from Snipping Tool is that workflow automation — capture and link-on-clipboard becomes one shortcut.

A converter wrapping FFmpeg with a UI, offering the intermediate codecs and batch jobs editors need. Against HandBrake it is aimed at post-production — ProRes, DNxHD and subtitle burn-in sit in the menu rather than in a command line.

Image compression with a side-by-side comparison, running MozJPEG, WebP and AVIF encoders in the browser through WebAssembly. Unlike TinyPNG nothing is uploaded, and every encoder setting is yours to tune.

A subtitle editor that shows a waveform and spectrogram underneath, reads over 200 formats, shifts timings and extracts burned-in subtitles by OCR. Those synchronisation tools are what separate it from simple subtitle editors.

A subtitle editor in the browser for opening .srt and .vtt files and fixing timings and text. Against desktop tools like Subtitle Edit it installs nothing, which is what you want for a quick fix on someone else’s machine.

Edits SVG path data (the d attribute) visually while listing the commands one by one. Against a general vector editor you get at the raw path text, which is what you want for fixing a hand-written icon.

Shrinks PNG and JPEG files through selective quantisation: drag, drop, no settings. Against Squoosh it offers batch processing and an API — Squoosh for one image, this for a hundred.

Converts a bitmap image into vector art. Against Illustrator’s trace, its edge detection is noticeably cleaner — it is a good route to recovering a logo from a low-resolution PNG.

A tool converting pixel images like PNG/JPG into vectors (SVG). Unlike redrawing by hand it automatically turns an existing logo into a scalable form.

A tool combining flowcharts, wireframes, sticky notes and mind maps on one canvas. Unlike single-purpose tools it keeps them all together in one document.

An editor that produces high-resolution favicons from images. Unlike one-click favicon generators, you can edit the icon pixel by pixel at each size.

Batch image conversion and processing that reads over 500 formats and writes around 70, with resize and watermark steps chained together. Unlike online converters it handles thousands of files locally with no size cap.

Cuts and downloads a specific range from a video — faster and kinder to disk than downloading the whole thing and trimming.