Adobe's web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this. Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you "sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn't tell you about until now!"
Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them.
They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.
Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!"
Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.
This is a little tangential, but your post reminded me that I've struggled with converting images at work because our vpn blocks a lot of those file conversation sites (presumably for good reason, but I'm not privy). Converting common file formats seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it. It seems like an obvious add to me, but then again the Windows search functionality barely works so I'm not sure they're incentived to actually help their users right now.
This. I honestly don't understand why people use online image converters when there are high-quality OSS programs that will do the job locally. I'll bet that the majority of the online converters are using these programs to do the actual conversion anyway.
That’s why. And also because sometimes it just works. I’ve done some packet-level work recently and wanted to decode text. The tools I’ve used were some online converters, not iconv or base64. Because experimenting with their modes adds mental overhead even if I more or less can use them without man. Choosing from-to and pasting text into a textbox takes no brain capacity.
25+ years ago, when internet wasn’t very accessible, there were multiple simple windows apps to do small things like this. Now they are online, but open source and new apps world in general never figured out that users still need it - simple, discoverable, easy to use tools. I’m not gonna scroll through pages of magick options and (in case it just works based on .ext, which I also should re-figure out from the lack of such option) try to remember if there’s -i and -o required for input and output.
Converting common file formats seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it.
It is in modern operating systems. Maybe not Windows, but modern operating systems like macOS have it built in.
You can do it a number of ways, including using Automator, Preview, or even access it from the Finder. I did it about 30 times today.
Select file > right click > Quick Service > Convert
MacOS can convert between pretty much any reasonable combination of formats using its automation/shortcuts framework. RTF→HTML→word or HEIC→jpg→png, whatever.
A browser + JavaScript seems like a pretty heavy lift to do something as trivial as converting an image from one format to another. ImageMagick is simple, fast, and available for just about every system imaginable.
It's oddly impressive how small-scale Adobe went with enforcing these registrations. Considering that converting between JPG and PNG is such a granular and common task that there are hundreds of websites just for that, in addition to it being built into almost every major OS.. it's very petty to ask for registration for something this small, rather than leave it open, like their color wheel tool.
Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually decide not to purchase from them. They'll then start spamming you without your consent a day later.
Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free" partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" - you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for this!"
Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites like this are allowed to exist.