“Save image as” kept handing me the thumbnail, so I built a ring that opens where I drag

David OtiFounder, Halo

It started with a picture of a dog.

I wanted it for a slide. Right-click, Save image as…, and what landed in my Downloads folder was a 300-pixel WebP file that my slides app wouldn’t open. The page was showing me a big, sharp photo. What it gave me was the thumbnail, in a format nothing else on my computer wanted.

So I did what everyone does. I opened the picture in a new tab, hunted for the bigger one, saved that, converted it somewhere else, opened it in Preview to crop it, and dragged it into the slide. Five minutes for one picture.

Once I started noticing, I saw the same detour everywhere. A video with nothing to right-click, because the page plays it from a stream. A frame from a video, which meant a screenshot and then a crop. A screenshot for a bug report with an email address that had to be covered first. A product photo that needed its background gone, which meant uploading it to a website I knew nothing about and downloading it again.

Each one was small. Together they were a good part of my day, and every one pulled me off the page I was working on.

Drag it, tap Shift, choose

The thing I wanted was already in my hand. When you start dragging a picture on a web page, the browser knows exactly which one you mean. Dragging is the most direct thing you can do to something on a page.

So that’s Halo. Start dragging an image or a video, tap Shift, and a ring of options opens around the pointer: the full-size original, PNG, JPG, a copy for the clipboard, the frame you’re on. Move toward the one you want and let go.

Only the direction counts. You don’t aim at a small menu item at the end of a long list; you move a little toward “Original” and that’s it. After a day the directions become habit, the way you stop looking at the keyboard.

Tap Alt while the ring is open and it turns into the tools: crop, edit, redact, annotate, trim. Tap ⌘ (Ctrl on Windows) and it’s the AI tools. Tap Shift to come back.

The original, not the thumbnail

The ring was the easy part. Most of the work went into making “Original” mean the original.

Google Images, Pinterest, X, Reddit and most shops show you a smaller copy of every picture. The full-size file is usually there, behind a different address, and every site hides it its own way. Halo has a rule for each site that matters, and for the rest it reads what the page offers and tries the biggest first.

Video was harder. Most video on the web isn’t a file. It arrives in small pieces, often with the picture and the sound in separate streams, and only the player puts them together. Halo notices which pieces a page loads, fetches them, and joins them into one MP4 in your browser. If the video is in a format QuickTime can’t play, it re-encodes it to H.264 with your computer’s own video encoder, so what you save plays everywhere.

Fix it before you save it

Then I noticed what I did after saving. I’d save a screenshot and open it to blur a name. Save a photo and open it to crop it square. Save a video and open an editor to keep ten seconds of it.

So the tools came to the page. Tap Alt in the ring and choose Crop, Redact, Annotate, Trim or the others, and a small window opens right there. It has undo and redo, and a bigger size when you need the room. Save applies your changes to the full-size original, not to the preview. Redact finds the text in a screenshot for you, so covering an email address doesn’t mean drawing boxes by hand.

Most of the AI runs on your computer

Removing a background, copying the text out of a screenshot and upscaling a small image all run on your computer, on its graphics chip where it has one. The models download once, the first time you use them, and Halo checks each one against a fingerprint it carries before it uses it. A background takes about a third of a second on a recent Mac. Nothing is uploaded.

A few things need more than a laptop: a sharper cut-out, a 4× upscale, a transcript of any video. Those run in Halo’s cloud and are marked ✦ in the ring. They send only the one picture, or only a video’s sound, that you chose them for, and the privacy policy names who processes it and for how long.

What it won’t do

Halo doesn’t download YouTube videos; YouTube doesn’t allow it. On YouTube the ring offers frames, the transcript, and a link at the current time instead. It doesn’t touch protected video either. I’d rather say that up front than have you find out.

Where it is now

Halo is for Chrome, and works in Edge, Brave and Arc too. Every install gets 50 free uses of everything, every tool and every on-device AI tool. After that it’s $29, once, for up to three browsers, with 100 AI credits for the cloud tools. No account, no subscription.

I’m building it on my own. I’d rather charge once for a small tool that does its job well than build something that needs to know about you, so Halo has no analytics and never sees the pages you visit.

I haven’t typed “Save image as” in months.

If you save things from the web as often as I do, I’d love you to try Halo and tell me what’s missing.

Add to Chrome — it’s free