Image to Base64
Image & Video Tools
Convert an image to a Base64 data URI with ready-to-copy HTML and CSS snippets — in your browser. Free, private, no signup.
How this Base64 converter works
This tool reads your image and produces its Base64 data URI — the text form of the image you can paste straight into HTML, CSS or JSON — with one-click copies for the raw string, an <img> tag and a CSS background. Conversion happens in your browser; the image never leaves your device. The honest part most converter sites skip entirely: Base64 makes files ~33% bigger and un-cacheable, so inlining is a win only for tiny images. This tool shows you the size cost on every conversion and tells you when inlining is a bad idea.
Base64 tips
- Inline tiny assets only — icons and logos under ~5 KB. The +33% size cost and lost caching outweigh the saved request for anything bigger.
- The killer use case: single-file HTML — email signatures, standalone reports, offline pages — where external images can't be referenced at all.
- SVGs often inline better as raw SVG markup than as Base64 — same effect, smaller and readable.
- A data URI in CSS needs no quotes escaping headaches: url("data:image/png;base64,…") works as-is with the copy button here.
- Need it smaller before inlining? Compress or resize the image first — Base64 multiplies whatever size you feed it.
Related tools
Image to Base64 — common questions
Latest questions readers ask us about this topic.
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read with the browser's FileReader and encoded on your device — nothing is transmitted. The output is just text, and it's yours to paste wherever you need it.
Why is the Base64 bigger than my image?
Base64 encodes 3 bytes of binary as 4 characters of text, an unavoidable +33% overhead before compression. That's the cost of representing an image as text — every converter has it, whether or not they mention it.
When should I actually use Base64 images?
When the image must live inside the document: email signatures, single-file HTML reports, tiny icons in CSS where an extra request costs more than the bytes, and JSON payloads that must carry an image. For normal web pages, regular image files with caching are almost always faster.
Does Base64 encoding lose quality?
No — it's a lossless re-encoding of the exact same bytes. Decode it and you get the identical image back. The trade-off is size and cacheability, never quality.
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