ARW to JPG — Free, Fast & Private
ARW is the raw format of the Sony Alpha system, and the Alpha system is where an enormous share of photographers met raw shooting for the first time. The a6000-series made interchangeable-lens cameras affordable, the a7 line made full-frame mirrorless mainstream, and both default enthusiastic new owners into a folder of .arw files that Windows Photos squints at and web forms refuse. If that is where you are: nothing is wrong with your files. Raw is the camera handing you unprocessed sensor data on purpose. This tool turns an ARW into a JPG anyone can open — and does it on your own device, with a real raw pipeline running in your browser, so a folder of unedited shoots never has to travel through someone else's server to become shareable.
The demosaic is real — and that is rarer than it should be
Every ARW ships with a small camera-rendered JPEG preview inside it, and a whole genre of "raw converters" quietly extracts that preview instead of touching the sensor data — which is why they finish instantly and why their output resolution never quite matches your sensor. This tool decodes the raw mosaic itself: unpack, full demosaic, your camera's recorded white balance applied — the genuine reconstruction of every pixel from what the sensor captured. The interface narrates the stages honestly, including calling the demosaic "the slow honest kind", because a few seconds of visible work beats an instant sleight of hand. What you download is your photograph at sensor scale, not the rear-screen thumbnail with a .jpg name.
Sony's compression flavours, briefly
"ARW" covers several internal variants, because Sony's raw strategy evolved in public. Early Alpha bodies wrote only a lossy-compressed raw; photographers pushed back, and Sony added uncompressed ARW in 2015, then lossless-compressed options on newer bodies — so the same extension can mean different encodings depending on the camera and menu settings. The LibRaw decoder underneath this tool is built for exactly that spread; camera-format coverage is the project's reason for existing, and the common Alpha variants decode without you needing to know which one you have. As with any third-party decoder, brand-new camera models can lead support by a few months — the failure mode here is a clear error message, never a preview passed off as a conversion.
Built for the culling-and-sharing gap
There is a moment in every hybrid shooter's workflow where full raw processing is overkill but the files still need to become JPGs: sending proofs to a client before the edit, posting a behind-the-scenes frame, getting one image to a phone, feeding a thumbnail to a video project. Spinning up a catalogue application for that is friction; uploading 30 MB per frame to a converter site is worse. This fills the gap: first use downloads about 1.4 MB of decoder (LibRaw compiled to WebAssembly, fetched from this site's own servers, cached after), and from then on ARW-to-JPG is a drag, a few seconds of local decode, and a download. Files up to 150 MB are accepted, no count limits, no queue — the only throughput constraint is your own hardware.
Quality slider, resolution, and the one stated limit
The JPEG quality slider defaults to 90% — high enough that the conversion is not where your image loses. When a destination has a hard size cap, convert first, then let the JPEG compressor chase the exact KB number; the two-step keeps each decision visible. On resolution: browsers cap total canvas area, and Sony sensors sail past it — 24 MP is the Alpha floor these days and 61 MP exists. When a file exceeds the cap, the export scales to the browser's maximum and the notice prints both sizes rather than letting you assume. For proofs, social, and everything short of large-format print, the exported size is comfortably more than the job needs.
The metadata stays home
An ARW records the shoot around the shot: body and lens identifiers, serial numbers, exposure data, timestamps, and location when the camera was paired to a phone's GPS. The exported JPG carries none of it — the conversion re-encodes pixel data from scratch, which drops the metadata block entirely, while the camera details you see on screen are read for display only. Your original ARW keeps its full record. This is the right default for images headed to marketplaces, forums, or clients; if you also need to sanitise JPEGs you already have, Remove EXIF handles those losslessly. And since Alpha shooters rarely live in a single-brand world, the same converter reads Nikon NEF, Canon CR2 and universal DNG too.