We’ve been busy! Over the last few months, our engineers have been beavering away to bring you some brand new file tools, add more supported file formats, and provide some customisable settings to give you more control over how your finished files turn out.
We started Zamzar back in 2006 (it’s our 20th birthday soon!) as an easy-to-use online file conversion service. Converting files is still our specialism, but over the last few years, we’ve been adding a host of file-processing tools too, for all those times when you just need to tweak a file and don’t fancy downloading a bulky program to do it. So whether you want to reduce the size of a PDF to make it easier to send by email, need to rotate a photo that’s upside down, or split a document to get the page you want, you can do that with the simple tools on our website.
We’ve expanded this range of tools even more recently, as well as adding some new features for conversion, so take a quick look at some of the tools, conversions, and customisable options we’ve added over the last few months:
New task-based tools
These tools are built around a specific job, so instead of picking formats and settings yourself, you tell us what you’re trying to achieve, and we optimise the final file for you.
Bank statement converters
Bank statements usually arrive as PDFs, which are easy to read but awkward to work with. If you’ve ever tried to copy a month’s worth of transactions out of a PDF and into a spreadsheet or your accounting software, you’ll know it’s slow and error-prone (and not good for your sanity!). We have some brand new bank statement converter and credit card statement converter tools that can read the transactions in your statement and turn them into a structured format you can actually use (like a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet). This makes it much easier to sort, total and categorise transactions, or to import your finance data into your accountancy software.
Tools to compress PDF and JPG files to a target size
Lots of websites and forms put a hard limit on the file size you can upload. You might be told your document needs to be under 2MB, or a photo has to come in below 500KB, and your file is just over the line. Or perhaps you’re emailing several photos to a friend, and your email provider has a limit on the total attachment size. We’ve added some new handy tools so you can compress your files to the specific file size you need. Whether you need to resize an image to 20KB or compress a PDF to 1MB, it’s as simple as uploading your PDF or image file and then downloading the compressed version from our site.
New file-processing tools
If your file needs a quick edit, these tools help you make the change swiftly without the need for hefty (and often expensive) file-editing software.
Extract sound from videos
Sometimes the audio is the part you actually want. Perhaps it’s the music soundtrack from a video, or the audio from a video podcast. It’s not worth installing video-editing software (and taking the time to learn how to use it!) just so you can extract the audio. With our new extract sound from video tool, you can simply upload your video and get the audio back in the versatile MP3 format.
Rotate PDF files
PDF files don’t always arrive the right way up. Scanned pages in particular have a habit of coming through sideways or upside down, usually because of how the document was fed into the scanner or scanned by a phone. Our rotate-PDF tool lets you turn the pages so they’re oriented correctly, and save the changes in an amended file.
Rotate videos
Have you got a video that’s playing upside down? Phones are the usual culprit here. You film something holding the phone one way, and the clip ends up sideways or upside down when you play it back on a computer. Our rotate-video tool allows you to fix the orientation and download a revised file, so your footage plays the right way up for you.
Speed up video and audio files
Our new speed-up tools let you save your video or audio files at a faster playback speed, with options from 1.5x up to 15x. And because the speed is saved in the final file, the change sticks, so you don’t need to keep amending your media player’s playback settings.
Speeding up content by a small amount, like 1.5x or 2x, can make listening to podcasts or meeting recordings more time-efficient. Whereas faster speeds, like 10x or 15x, are ideal for creating time-lapse videos, producing fast-motion effects, or generating condensed highlight reels.
New formats supported
3D file formats
3D file formats are used to represent three-dimensional objects and models, containing information on their shape, and sometimes their colour and texture too. If you’ve used a 3D printer, designed something in CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software, or worked with models for games or animation, these are the files you’ll have come across.
Different programs and devices expect different 3D formats, and a model exported from one tool often won’t open in another without converting it first. You can now use our 3D converters to change your 3D files into the different formats you need. We now support the following 3D file formats: 3DS, 3MF, AMF, ASE, DAE, FBX, GLB, OBJ, PLY, and STL.
Take a look at our detailed blog post on 3D file conversion to find out more about converting your 3D files and how to get the best results.
New conversions
Turn a video into still images
With our video-to-image tools, you can now convert your video recordings into image files, taking the frames of your footage and saving them as pictures. This makes it easy to take a still from your video to use as a thumbnail image, or to capture a specific moment from a video clip to print as a photo. We’ve added this for a range of common video formats, including 3GP, FLV, MP4, MOV, MPG, WEBM and WMV, and you can convert any of these formats into JPG or PNG image files. If you’re not sure which image format to choose, opt for JPG when a smaller file size matters, and go for PNG when having crisp detail is more important.
More control over your conversions
We’ve heard from you that you’d like more control over the features of your converted file, whether that’s a higher sample rate for your MP3 file so it’s compatible with your audio-editing software, or specific dimensions for your JPG file so you can upload it directly to Instagram. So we’ve added customisable settings to many of our conversion tools, allowing you to choose exactly how you want the converted file to be.
Advanced settings for image conversions
When you convert your image files to various document and image formats, these handy, customisable options let you tailor the appearance of the final file as you need. Things you can now do with your file are:
- Resize the image: There are multiple options to choose from here, depending on what you want to do with the final file. If you need a smaller image, then scaling your picture by a certain percentage will give you a file with adjusted dimensions but the same aspect ratio. If you’ll be uploading the file to social media, then you can choose to optimise the image size for a specific platform and post type, such as an Instagram reel, a Facebook profile picture, or a YouTube thumbnail.
- Rotate the image: If your picture is the wrong way round, this option lets you quickly rotate it by 90, 180 or 270 degrees.
- Convert the image to grayscale: You can use this to remove colour from your image – for example, if you want to print a black-and-white version.
- Mirror the image: Flip your image horizontally to get a mirrored version. This can be particularly useful for creating thumbnails for social media when you want to later add text to a specific side of the image.
- Blur the image: If you want to blur a photo or picture to use as a background for overlaid text, then this option applies a softening blur effect for you.
- Auto-orientate the image: Select this option to automatically adjust your picture’s orientation based on the file’s metadata, ensuring the image displays correctly.
Advanced settings for audio conversions
We’ve also added some customisable settings for some of our audio conversions (such as M4A to MP3 and AAC to WAV), so you can have more say over the features of your converted file. These are the new options you can amend as needed:
- Sample rate: This is the number of audio samples taken per second. Higher numbers mean a more accurate representation of sound, but also tend to result in much larger file sizes. You might need to adjust the sample rate to ensure your file is compatible with the software you want to use it in, or to reduce the size of the file.
- Volume: Increase or reduce the volume of your audio with this setting.
- Mono/Stereo sound: Choose between stereo sound, which is better for music, films and games, or mono sound, which is better for spoken word.
- Fade in, fade out: Select this option if you’d like the audio to fade in at the start and fade out at the end. This can help create a more polished finish to backing tracks.
We want to hear from you!
We’d love to know what you think of the new tools, conversions and customisable settings. Are there any tweaks you’d like us to make or additional settings you’d like to see? And are there any file-processing tasks you perform regularly that you’d love to have a simple two-click file tool for?
Our (100% human) customer support team work closely with our engineers to provide feedback on your experience with our tools and to suggest improvements and new features, so please drop us an email at support@zamzar.com with any comments or requests you have.
And as always, happy file processing!
[Cover photo by Look Studio. Additional photos by Winston Chen and Andre Hunter.]