About TidyBG

TidyBG is a free background remover that runs in your browser. Your photos are processed on your own computer or phone. They are not uploaded to us or to anyone else.

How it works

Modern browsers can run AI models on your device using WebGPU and WebAssembly. The first time you remove a background, your browser downloads the model and keeps it in its cache: about 5 MB on phones, and on computers about 200 MB plus about 220 MB for a second, more detailed pass. After that, every image is processed locally.

Phones use the small model, so results on hair and fine detail are less precise than on a computer. Logos, signatures and plain white backgrounds don't need AI at all: a color-based method handles them in about a second.

Open-source credits

TidyBG builds on open-source work:

• BEN2 (Background Erase Network) by Prama LLC, MIT License. Copyright (c) 2025 Prama LLC.
• U²-Net (U2-Netp) by Xuebin Qin et al., Apache License 2.0.
• ONNX Runtime Web by Microsoft, MIT License.
• MediaPipe Face Landmarker by Google, Apache License 2.0. Used on your device to find faces for passport photos.
• MediaPipe Face Detector (BlazeFace short range) and Selfie Multiclass Segmenter by Google, Apache License 2.0. Used on computers to recognize portraits and keep only the person.
• Bricolage Grotesque typeface by Mathieu Triay, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Astro web framework, MIT License.

Photo credits

Sample, showcase and share images use these photos from Wikimedia Commons:

• “Smiling senior woman with curly hair portrait” by Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0. Source.
• “Red car toy” by Jebulon, CC0. Source.
• Brown leather sneaker by SPERA.de, CC BY 2.0. Source.
• “Portrait of a dog standing on the grass” by Tudor Washington Collins, CC BY 4.0. Source.

We edited these photos with TidyBG: the background was removed, replaced or blurred, and some were cropped or resized. The logo and signature in our share images were made for this site.