ARW to JPG — turn Sony RAW captures into JPG, right in your browser

ARW is Sony's RAW format, the file your Alpha mirrorless body — an a7, a7R, a6400, a1 — or an RX compact writes when you shoot RAW instead of JPG. Rather than a finished picture, an ARW holds the sensor's raw readout: the untouched data captured before any in-camera processing turns it into something you can look at. That is exactly what makes it powerful for editing and, at the same time, awkward to use. Double-click an ARW on most computers and you get an error or a blank thumbnail, because the file is not a standard image at all — it is a container the outside world was never taught to read.

JPG is the opposite kind of file: a compact, finished picture that every browser, phone, chat app, and upload form already understands. Converting an ARW to JPG bakes the sensor data into that universal image and squeezes it with JPG compression, so a capture that filled 40 or 50 megabytes on the card lands as a JPG of a couple of megabytes or less. That is the trade the format is built around — a small, lossy file you can share in seconds instead of a heavyweight RAW no one can open. AnyResizer converts at quality 90 by default, which keeps Sony photos looking clean while still delivering the big drop in size.

Here is the honest part. AnyResizer performs a baseline demosaic at the as-shot white balance and exposure — it turns the sensor data into a viewable image, but it is not Sony's RAW development. There are no white-balance, exposure, or Creative Look controls, and converting flattens away the editing latitude the ARW was holding for you. So keep the ARW original if you ever plan to grade or recover a shot. Every decode and re-encode runs inside your browser through WebAssembly, so no file is sent to a server, and metadata including GPS is stripped by default to keep the JPG lean.