Convert almost any file: every format pair Nemi supports

Somebody sends you a HEIC from an iPhone, a client wants the MOV as an MP4, and the spreadsheet arrived as an XLS that nothing on your laptop opens. In Nemi you convert the file where it already is, and the question that matters is a simple one: can it become the thing you need?

The answer is not a list somebody typed into a web page. It is a registry in the conversion engine itself, the same one the Convert panel asks every time you open it. We dumped that registry into the figure below, so you can look up any pair before you upload anything.

Can Nemi convert my file to the format I need?

Pick the format you have, or type it. Every format it can become appears underneath, grouped the way the panel groups them. Type a second format to get a straight yes or no, with the route it takes and what it costs from your daily allowance.

What happens to each kind of file?

Conversion runs on machines we operate, not on an outside conversion service, so your file is not handed to another company to be turned into something else. Inside, each family goes to the part of the engine that is built for it.

Pictures (40 formats in). Decoded, resized if you asked, and encoded again inside our own engine, which is written in Rust. iPhone HEIC, AVIF and Photoshop files are first opened by a dedicated decoder, and camera RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm and the rest are developed by a RAW decoder before anything else happens. Any picture can also become a PDF page, or be traced into an SVG.

Vector graphics (2 in). An SVG is drawn at the size you choose into any picture format, or laid into a PDF that stays sharp at any zoom.

Video and audio (20 and 23 in). Re-encoded by an established open source media encoder. A video can also give up a single frame, a sequence of frames, its soundtrack, or its subtitle track. Heavy jobs like these queue for a fixed number of slots, so the engine never runs more encoders than the machine can handle.

Documents (23 in). A document converter reads the structure of one format (headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, links) and writes it in another. PDFs are the exception, because a PDF is a printed page rather than a structure: it is read into text, a web page or one image per page.

Spreadsheets and data (8 in), and subtitles (4 in). Workbooks are read cell by cell and written as CSV, TSV, XLSX, ODS, JSON or an HTML table. Subtitles move between SRT, WebVTT, ASS and SSA, and can be shifted in time on the way.

Why do some conversions take two steps?

Of the 2,778 pairs, 1,940 are done in one step and 838 take a route through a format in between. The engine finds the shortest route itself, and it is careful about which detours it allows: a route never crosses from one family into another and back, and never passes through a step that might produce a ZIP.

The route is worth knowing for one pair in particular. A PDF into a Word document goes PDF to HTML to DOCX, because the PDF is read as a web page first. You get the words, the headings and the paragraphs in an editable file. You do not get a copy of the page layout, and a scanned PDF, which is a picture of text, has no words to give.

How do I convert a file in Nemi?

1. 1

   Select the file and press Convert

   Press Convert in the toolbar, or right-click the file. The right-click menu lists the likeliest targets under Convert to; when there are more, the last entry, All, opens the full panel.
2. 2

   Pick one or more formats

   Under Convert to the formats are grouped by kind, and a long list gets a search box. Several files of the same kind convert together, and each format you pick is its own conversion.
3. 3

   Change the settings, or leave them

   Settings shows what each format takes: quality, size in pixels, bitrate, which pages of a PDF, which sheet of a workbook. Anything you leave alone uses the format's own default.
4. 4

   Choose where the result goes

   Under Result, Download sends it to your device and keeps nothing; Save to workspace puts it in a folder you choose, next to the original by default. The original is never replaced.
5. 5

   Press Convert

   The button shows what the job costs in units before you press it. A job with several results arrives as one ZIP, and a running job can be cancelled without spending anything.

How much can I convert?

Conversion starts on Starter. Each plan has a daily allowance of units, a largest conversion (the file, or the files together) and a number of formats you can ask for at once. A file over the size limit is refused before any work starts, so it costs nothing.

The allowance belongs to the owner of the workspace you are working in, and resets at midnight UTC. The help page on converting files has every detail, and the pricing page has the plans side by side.

What is not on the list

A few things people search for are deliberately somewhere else. Packing files into a ZIP or a TAR is compression, not conversion. Turning a spreadsheet into a Nemi Sheet is Open as Nemi Sheet in the right-click menu. And formats the engine cannot read properly, such as Apple Pages or Keynote files, are left out rather than half supported: a conversion that sometimes works is worse than an honest no. If you need one, the panel tells you where to ask.

Everything here happens in Convert. For one common job in detail, read the guide to making a video small enough to send, and for how fast the engine is, every benchmark from its rewrite.