About NextG Design
NextG Design is a free, privacy-first AI photo editor and a set of focused image tools that run entirely in your web browser. Your photos are edited on your own device — never uploaded — and there's no sign-up, no watermark and no paid tier.
What NextG Design offers
Everything starts with the AI Photo Editor — a Photoshop-style workspace in the browser, with a menu bar, a grouped tool rail, a Properties panel, layers, history and keyboard shortcuts. Around it are focused tools for jobs you want done in one click. New here? Watch the short video tutorial on our home page.
AI editing, on your device
🧽 Remove anything
Magic Eraser paints out people, objects, text and wires; spot healing fixes blemishes; content-aware fill, move and scale rebuild the scene. Large areas are filled in two passes for clean results. Magic Eraser →
🪄 Backgrounds & selections
Remove or replace a background, select the subject or the sky, or click any object to select it — edges are refined against the real photo to avoid halos. Change background →
📷 Portrait & depth
Portrait Blur with realistic depth, Lens Blur, Blur Gallery, AI Relight and Depth Fog, 3D parallax photos (GIF/MP4) and Sky Replacement with realistic clouds. Blur background →
🙂 Faces
Face & Retouch for every face at once — smooth skin, face light, brighter eyes, whiter teeth, slimmer face, bigger eyes — plus face-aware Liquify and consent-based Face Swap. Face retouch →
🕰️ Old photos
Restore finds and repairs scratches and dust, cleans grain, brings back faded contrast (keeping or neutralising sepia tone) and can colorize black-and-white photos. Restore old photos →
✨ Generative AI
Generative Fill, an AI Image Generator, AI Restyle (watercolor, oil, sketch, anime…) and an AI Background Generator — running on your own graphics card with WebGPU. Generative Fill →
🛡️ Privacy redaction
Find and hide faces, card numbers, emails, phone numbers and number plates with blur, pixelation or a black box — using on-device face detection and text recognition.
📐 Smart crop & upscale
AI Smart Crop composes the frame for every social media size at once; AI upscaling and standard upscaling enlarge small images with sharper detail. Smart crop →
Professional editing tools
- Layers and masks — 26 blend modes, layer groups, layer masks, clipping masks, layer styles (shadows, glows, strokes, bevels), smart objects with smart filters, adjustment layers and layer comps.
- Colour and tone — Adjust sliders for exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, warmth and tint, rendered in real time on the graphics card with WebGL; Curves & Levels; Camera Raw; Replace Color (click a colour, shift its hue, saturation and lightness); Selective Color, Channel Mixer, Color Lookup (LUTs) and 16 one-tap filters.
- Text, shapes and drawing — click-to-type text with 20 fonts, alignment, letter spacing, line height, rotation, outlines, shadows and warps; shapes and arrows for annotations, watermarks and banners; brushes, Mixer Brush, gradients, pen paths and stickers.
- Retouching — Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, Patch, Dodge/Burn/Sponge, Blur/Sharpen/Smudge, Red Eye, History Brush and frequency separation.
- Transform and geometry — crop and straighten, perspective crop, free transform, warp, puppet warp, Liquify, lens correction, content-aware scale and generative expand.
- Selections — lasso, marquee, magic wand, quick selection, colour range, focus area, Quick Mask and Refine Edge.
- Workflow — unlimited-feeling undo with a visual History panel, Actions you can record and replay, merge to HDR, focus stacking, panoramas, image trace to SVG, animation timeline, notes, guides and rulers, custom keyboard shortcuts and autosave.
- Formats and output — open JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF and SVG; save JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP, ICO favicons and SVG with print size (px, in, cm, mm) and DPI; export several sizes at once; print or save as PDF; keep layers editable in .nextg project files.
Free single-purpose tools
For one quick job, open a focused tool: the Batch Image Processor (resize, convert, compress with the same professional encoders, strip EXIF and rename 20+ images, then download one ZIP), Background Remover, Image Upscaler, Image Compressor (MozJPEG, WebP, AVIF and OxiPNG encoders with a before/after slider and target file size), Image Resizer, Image Cropper, Photo Blur, Passport Photo Maker, Signature Background Remover, Image Metadata Remover, Image to PDF, and converters for JPG to PNG, PNG to JPG, WebP to JPG and WebP to PNG. AI features each have their own page too, such as Colorize Photo, Photo to Painting, AI Image Generator, Face Swap, 3D Photo, Relight Photo and Sky Replacement. See the full list on All Tools.
How the on-device AI works
Instead of sending your photo to a server, we send the AI to you. The first time you use an AI feature, your browser downloads the model once and caches it; after that it runs on your own processor and graphics card using WebAssembly, WebGL and WebGPU. The models we use are open-source or openly licensed:
- Inpainting (Magic Eraser, healing, content-aware fill, restore) — MI-GAN.
- Subject and background — ISNet segmentation, refined with an edge-aware filter at full resolution.
- Click-to-select — SlimSAM (Segment Anything).
- Depth (portrait and lens blur, sky, relight, fog, 3D photos) — Depth Anything V2.
- Colorize — DDColor; scratch detection — Microsoft's “Bringing Old Photos Back to Life”.
- Faces — Google MediaPipe Face Landmarker; text recognition for redaction — Tesseract.
- Upscaling — Swin2SR; generative fill and image generation — Stability AI's SD-Turbo on WebGPU.
Because the work happens locally, speed depends on your device. A recent laptop handles most AI edits in seconds; generative features need a computer with WebGPU support.
Privacy by design
Your images never leave your device, so there's nothing for us to store, leak or train on. The site itself uses Google Analytics and Google AdSense (which set cookies, as explained in our Cookie Policy) and a small cookie-free visit counter of our own that never stores IP addresses. Nothing you edit or type is ever sent. Read the details in our Privacy Policy.
Who it's for
- Online sellers — clean product photos on white, consistent sizes for every marketplace, bulk conversion to WebP or JPG.
- Creators and social media managers — quick retouching, text and banners, smart crops for every platform.
- Families and historians — restoring and colorizing old prints without handing them to a cloud service.
- Photographers and designers — layers, masks, curves, Camera Raw, print-ready TIFF at 300 DPI.
- Anyone sharing sensitive images — strip location data, blur faces and redact card numbers or plates before posting.
Why we build it this way
Most "free" image tools online upload your photo to a server, process it there and send the result back — so a company you've never heard of holds a copy of your picture. Modern browsers are now powerful enough to do this work themselves. Keeping everything on your device means:
- Your images never leave your device, so there's nothing to leak, retain or misuse.
- There's no account, login or payment between you and your result.
- Tools run as fast as your hardware allows, with no upload queue — and many keep working offline once loaded.
Who's behind it
NextG Design is a small, independent project based in Auckland, New Zealand. Full legal operator details are listed in our Imprint. If you have a question we haven't answered here, see our Contact page.
How we write our guides
Our Guides are written by the same people who build the tools, based on how the tools actually behave and on testing with real photos — from removing backgrounds and generative fill to passport photo sizes and on-device AI privacy. We follow a few simple rules:
- Accuracy over hype. We explain what a tool can't do as clearly as what it can — for example, that upscaling can't recover detail a photo never captured.
- Official rules come from official sources. Where a guide summarises external requirements (passport photo sizes, marketplace image rules, platform image sizes), we say so and point you to the issuing authority, because those rules change.
- Dated and maintained. Every guide shows when it was published and last updated, and we revise guides when tools or external rules change.
- Corrections are welcome. If you spot something wrong or out of date, tell us via the Contact page and we'll fix it.
Frequently asked questions
Is NextG Design really free?
Yes. Every tool and the full AI Photo Editor are free to use, with no sign-up, no watermark, no daily limit and no paid tier. The site is supported by ads.
Are my photos uploaded to a server?
No. Images are opened, edited and saved by your own browser using JavaScript, WebAssembly, WebGL and WebGPU. The AI models download to your device and run there, so your photos never travel to us or anyone else. You can check this in your browser's network tab.
Which AI features run on my device?
Magic Eraser and spot healing, background removal and replacement, click-to-select objects, portrait and lens blur with real depth, sky replacement, face retouching, face blur and privacy redaction, old-photo restoration and colorization, AI upscaling, smart crop, relighting and depth fog, 3D photos, and — on computers with WebGPU — generative fill, an AI image generator, AI restyle and an AI background generator.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Everything runs in a modern browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari) on Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android or iOS. The first time you use an AI feature, its model is downloaded once and cached by your browser.
Can I work on many images at once?
Yes. The Batch Image Processor resizes, converts, strips metadata from and renames dozens of images in one go and downloads them as a single ZIP. In the editor you can also record an Action and run it on a batch of photos.
Which file formats are supported?
The editor and batch tool open JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF and SVG, and save JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP, ICO favicons and SVG — with print size in inches, centimetres or millimetres and a DPI setting. Projects can be saved as .nextg files that keep layers editable.
Is it safe for private or sensitive photos?
That is exactly what it is designed for. Because nothing is uploaded, it is a good fit for ID documents, family photos, client work and unreleased products. The Privacy Redaction tool can also find and hide faces, card numbers, emails, phone numbers and number plates before you share an image.
Who runs NextG Design?
NextG Design is an independent project based in Auckland, New Zealand. Full operator details are on the Imprint page, and you can reach us through the Contact page.
Start editing
Open the AI Photo Editor, watch the video tutorial, process a folder of photos with the Batch Image Processor, or browse all tools and our guides.
Last updated: 20 October 2026