Base64 to Image – Decode and Save Pictures

Paste a Base64 string in the box above and the picture appears at once. This page turns Base64 to image in your browser: it reads the text, finds the bytes, works out what kind of picture they are and shows a preview with the format, the width and height in pixels and the file size. Press Download to save it, or pick another format first.

You do not need to clean the text up. A full data URI such as data:image/png;base64,iVBOR… works, and so does the bare Base64 after the comma. Line breaks, spaces, missing = padding and the URL-safe letters - and _ are all accepted. You can even paste a whole web page, stylesheet, JSON response, SVG or Markdown file: every embedded picture inside it is found and listed, up to 200 at a time.

Nothing is sent anywhere. The decoding, the preview and the conversion all happen on your own device, so you can safely paste text from private projects, internal APIs or customer emails.

Base64 was made for systems that only handle text. Email, JSON, XML, HTML attributes and many databases are built around letters and digits, and raw picture bytes would break them: a byte might look like the end of a line, a quote mark or an invisible control character. Base64 avoids that by using only 64 safe characters, A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9, plus and slash, with the = sign for padding at the end.

To do that, it takes the bytes three at a time, which is 24 bits, and splits them into four groups of 6 bits. Each 6-bit group is a number from 0 to 63, and that number picks one of the 64 characters. Decoding simply runs this backwards. Nothing is compressed or encrypted along the way, so anybody can turn the text back into the original picture, and the result is identical to the file that was encoded.

You meet Base64 pictures in many places: icons inside CSS files, logos inside HTML emails, thumbnails and signatures in API responses, photos stored in database columns, pictures saved by canvas.toDataURL in web apps, and attachments inside the raw source of an email.

Base64 is a way of writing any file as plain letters, digits and a few symbols, so it can travel inside text: an HTML page, a CSS file, a JSON reply or an email. A base64 to image converter simply reverses that. It turns the text back into the original bytes and gives them to you as a picture you can see, save and open in any program.

Here the reversing is done by a small decoder written for this site rather than the browser's own atob function. That matters for big pictures: it works on bytes directly, has no practical length limit for normal photos and screenshots, skips line breaks and spaces, and accepts both Base64 alphabets. If a character in the middle of the text is not part of Base64 at all, it is ignored rather than stopping the whole job.

Once the bytes are back, the page reads their first few bytes, the so-called magic number, to find out what they really are. The format label you see on each preview comes from the bytes themselves, not from the data URI prefix, so a picture labelled image/png that is really a JPG is still shown and saved correctly as a JPG.

Doing base64 to image online usually means pasting your text into a form that sends it to a server. This page works differently: once it has loaded, the decoding runs as code inside your browser tab. Your Base64 never leaves the device, there is no upload progress bar to wait for, and even a picture of several megabytes appears in a moment.

That also means the tool keeps working on a slow or patchy connection after the page has opened. It runs in any current browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android and iPhone, with no add-on, plug-in or app to install.

As a base64 to image decoder, the page follows a few simple rules. Every four Base64 characters stand for three bytes. Spaces, tabs and line breaks are skipped. The = signs at the end are only padding, so they may be there or not. The characters - and _ are read as + and /, which is how URL-safe Base64 is written.

There is one thing a decoder cannot fix: text that was cut off. Base64 comes in groups of four characters, and if exactly one character is left over at the end, part of the last byte is missing. In that case you see the message “Not valid Base64: the length is wrong (cut off when copying?)”. Copy the value again, making sure you take everything up to the closing quote or bracket.

If the text decodes but the bytes are not a picture, you get a clear message instead of a broken image. When the bytes are another known file type, the message names it, for example a PDF document, a ZIP archive or a font, so you know to use a different tool. When they are something unknown, the message shows how many bytes were decoded.

You can turn base64 to image free of charge here, with no account, no email address and no limit on how many strings you decode in a day. There is no watermark on the saved picture and nothing is held back for a paid plan.

It can stay free because your own device does the work. Decoding text and drawing a picture are light jobs for any phone or laptop, so there is no server to pay for and no queue.

Saving a base64 to image file takes one click on Download. With Save as set to Keep the format, the file is written byte for byte as it was encoded, and it gets a name such as image-1.png, image-2.jpg or image-3.svg, numbered in the order the pictures appear in your text. The file extension always matches the real format found in the bytes.

When the text held more than one picture, a Download all button appears with the number of pictures on it. It packs every readable picture into one ZIP file called base64-images.zip, using the Save as choice for each. Pictures that could not be read are left out of the ZIP, and the count above the previews tells you how many were skipped.

Want a different format? The Save as setting has four choices. Keep the format saves the original bytes. PNG, JPG and WebP redraw the picture in your browser and save it in that format at full size; JPG and WebP use a quality of 92, which keeps the picture sharp while making it much smaller than PNG for photos.

To go from base64 to png, choose PNG under Save as and press Download. If the decoded picture is already a PNG, the original bytes are saved untouched. If it is a JPG, GIF, WebP, BMP or ICO, the picture is drawn at its own pixel size and saved as a PNG, with transparent areas kept transparent.

PNG is the safe choice for logos, icons, screenshots, charts and anything with sharp edges or text, because it is lossless: every pixel is stored exactly. An animated GIF or WebP is saved as one still frame.

To go from base64 to jpg, choose JPG under Save as. JPG has no transparency, so transparent areas become white before the picture is saved; that is better than the black background some converters give. If the bytes are already a JPG, they are saved as they are, with no second round of compression.

JPG is a good fit for photos you want to email, upload to a form or place in a document, because the file is much smaller than a PNG of the same photo. If the result is still too large for a form, run it through Compress Image, and if you have a PNG file on disk rather than Base64, PNG to JPG does the same conversion for whole folders of pictures.

WebP is the third conversion choice. It keeps transparency like PNG and makes photos small like JPG, which suits pictures for websites and apps. Every current browser can show WebP, but some older desktop programs cannot open it, so pick PNG or JPG if the file is going into an older editor or office program.

A quick guide to the four Save as choices: keep the format whenever the original opens where you need it, because it is exact and loses nothing. Pick PNG for screenshots, logos, icons and anything with text or transparency. Pick JPG for photos going into email, office documents or upload forms that ask for JPG. Pick WebP for pictures that go back onto a website. The choice applies to every picture you download afterwards, including the ones in the ZIP, so you can switch it before pressing Download all.

On Windows and macOS, open the page in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, paste with Ctrl+V or Cmd+V and press Download. The file lands in your Downloads folder. For a very long value, saving it in a text file and using Open a file is often easier than selecting it all on screen.

On iPhone and iPad, long-press the box and choose Paste, then tap Download on the picture; Safari asks where to save it, or puts it in the Downloads folder of the Files app. On Android, paste the same way and the picture goes to Downloads, where your gallery app can find it. A ZIP of many pictures opens in the Files app on both systems.

On Linux and ChromeOS, any current Chromium or Firefox browser works the same way as on a desktop. No part of the tool needs an install, a plug-in or a sign-in on any device.

This page also works as a base64 image viewer when you only want to look. Each picture is shown on a light checkerboard, so you can see at a glance which parts are transparent. Under it you see the format in capitals, the size in pixels, for example 24×24 for the sample, and the decoded file size in B, KB or MB.

That makes it quick to check what an API actually returned, which icon a stylesheet embeds, or whether a thumbnail in a database is the size it should be. Large pictures are scaled down to fit the preview box, but the pixel size shown and the file you save are always the full original size.

The preview updates as you type or paste, so you can paste one value after another without pressing any button. Clear empties the box and removes the previews.

Because four characters carry three bytes, Base64 text is about a third longer than the file it holds. A 30 KB picture becomes roughly 40 KB of text, and line breaks add a little more. That is why the file size shown under each preview is smaller than the length of the text you pasted: it is the size of the real, decoded file you will save.

This is also why large photos are rarely embedded as data URIs on websites. For small icons the saved request is worth it; for photos, a normal file is lighter. If you are cleaning up a page, decoding its data URIs here and saving them as files is a good first step, and Compress Image can shrink them further.

A data URI is a link that carries the file inside it: data:, then the type such as image/png, then ;base64, and then the encoded bytes. Web developers use them to put small icons straight into HTML and CSS so the browser does not need an extra request. Going from data uri to image is what the box does automatically, and it works on more than one at a time.

Paste the source of an email template, a saved web page, a CSS file, a JSON export, an SVG with embedded bitmaps or a Markdown note, and the page searches the whole text for every data:image URI with Base64 content. Each one is decoded and shown in the order it appears, up to 200 pictures. This is handy for pulling the logos out of an HTML email, recovering icons from an old stylesheet, or checking which pictures make a page heavy.

Only data URIs that use Base64 are picked up. SVG data URIs that are written as plain or percent-encoded text, without ;base64, are not decoded. If no data URI is found at all, the page treats the whole text as one Base64 value.

If you need to convert base64 to image inside your own program, the steps are the same in every language: remove the data: prefix if there is one, decode the Base64 to bytes, and write the bytes to a file or show them. Below are short, working examples you can copy. Each assumes the text is in a variable called data.

Everything happens in your browser. The text you paste, the files you open and the pictures you save stay on your device and are never uploaded, logged or stored by us. You can check this yourself: once the page has loaded, turn off your network and the tool keeps working.

Because the page only reads text and shows pictures, it cannot run anything that is hidden in the Base64. SVG pictures are shown through an image element, which does not run scripts inside the SVG.

The page searches your text for data:image URIs with a regular expression and collects their Base64 parts, removing spaces and line breaks. If it finds none, it treats the whole text, minus any quotes at the ends, as one value. Each value is decoded to bytes, and the first bytes are compared with the known signatures of PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, HEIC, BMP, ICO and SVG.

Readable pictures are shown from a temporary blob address inside your browser, and their pixel size is read once they load. For PNG, JPG or WebP output, the picture is drawn on a canvas at its full size, with a white background first for JPG, and saved from there. The ZIP is built in your browser as well.

The temporary addresses are released as soon as you change the text or clear the box, so pasting one large value after another does not keep filling your memory. Closing the tab removes the decoded pictures from memory altogether.

Need to go the other way? Image to Base64 turns any picture into a data URI or raw Base64, ready for HTML, CSS or JSON. For text or other file types, the Base64 tool encodes and decodes anything, with a choice of character sets and URL-safe output.

Once your picture is saved, Resize Image changes its pixel size, Compress Image makes the file smaller, Convert Image changes the format of many files at once, and PNG to JPG is there when a form only accepts JPG.