DaisyThe converter that
comes to you.
Hold Shift, drag a file, drop it on a petal. Daisy puts a wheel of every format that file can become right where you are — and converts it on your Mac, without uploading a thing.
Live preview — hover a petal
How it works
Three seconds, no window management.
No app to bring forward, no file picker, no “choose an output folder” dialog. The wheel appears, you let go, it’s done.
Shift-drag
Start dragging a file out of Finder with Shift held. The wheel appears, already showing what that file can turn into.
Drop on a petal
Only formats every dragged file can produce are offered, so a mixed selection never gives you a dead end. Arrows and ↵ work too.
It’s in Finder
The result lands next to the original and Finder reveals it. The wheel gets out of your way on its own.
Formats
Everything you actually hit.
Images, PDFs, OCR and background removal are native — they work on a
bare Mac with nothing installed. Video, audio and documents lean on tools Daisy
can't legally redistribute, so those want one brew install.
| Class | Converts | Engine |
|---|---|---|
| Images | jpg png webp heic avif tiff bmp gif in any direction, SVG → raster, raster → SVG by tracing |
ImageIO · cwebp resvg · potrace |
| Audio | mp3 m4a aac wav flac ogg opus aiff |
ffmpeg |
| Video | mp4 mov mkv webm avi m4v, plus → GIF and → any audio format |
ffmpeg |
| Documents | md html rtf txt epub docx odt, Office → PDF, PDF → txt/docx |
pandoc LibreOffice |
images → PDF, PDF → a folder of png jpg tiff pages |
PDFKit | |
| Archives | folder ↔ zip tar tar.gz 7z, extract zip tar 7z rar |
bsdtar · 7-Zip |
Tools
Hold ⌥ for the things that aren’t conversions.
Same file, rewritten. Two of these lean on frameworks already in macOS, so they cost nothing and never leave the machine.
Nine same-format edits
Resize, compress, crop to aspect, trim, strip metadata, merge and split PDFs — each with presets so there is nothing to type.
OCR → searchable PDF
Vision reads the page and Daisy writes a real invisible text layer, so the PDF is selectable, searchable and Spotlight-indexed — not a picture of words.
Remove background
The same subject-lift macOS uses in Preview, applied to a whole selection at once, out as transparent PNG.
Recipes & watch folders
For the thing you do every week.
A recipe chains steps — resize to 1600,
strip metadata, save as WebP. Point a watch folder at one and anything you drop
in that folder is converted and filed automatically, the original moved to
_processed/.
Command line
The same engine, scriptable.
Everything the wheel does, daisy does —
same capability graph, same bundled engines, no separate install.
daisy convert photo.png --to webp --quality 80 daisy convert *.jpg --to pdf --out ~/Desktop daisy convert shot.png --preset web-jpg daisy tool ocr scan.png # → searchable daisy recipe square-jpg *.png daisy watch add ~/Incoming --to webp daisy formats # the whole graph
Local only
Nothing is uploaded. Ever.
Dragging a passport scan, a contract, or a client’s raw footage into a free web converter means handing it to someone else’s server. Daisy has no network code in the conversion path at all — the engines run as child processes on your Mac and the bytes never leave it.
54
self-checks in the binary
0
bytes leave your Mac
82
formats it speaks
Free
for anything noncommercial — source included
Get it
Download, or build from source.
Signed ad-hoc, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open. Free for any noncommercial use, source and all — Swift and AppKit, SwiftPM, no Xcode project, safety checks inside the binary.
git clone https://github.com/ishanmalu/daisy cd daisy swift run Daisy --selftest # 63 graph + logic checks Scripts/bundle-engines.sh # vendor cwebp, qpdf, resvg, … Scripts/build-app.sh 0.6.1 # → dist/Daisy.app
brew install ffmpeg pandoc potrace and Daisy finds them.
Same on Intel, where Homebrew no longer bottles every engine.