Pick to Pixel: Photo-Pixel Art

Free, fully offline pixel-art studio. Drop a photo, choose colors, edit pixel by pixel. No ads, no IAP, no account.

Turn any photo into editable pixel art — then refine it with a real pixel-by-pixel editor. Pick to Pixel takes the photo you tap, extracts a smart color palette, and converts it into a clean pixel-art canvas you can keep tweaking. PHOTO TO PIXEL ART, INSTANTLY • Pick a photo from your gallery, choose a canvas size from 8×8 up to 256×256, and Pick to Pixel renders pixel-perfect art on the spot. • Smart palette extraction lets you tune the color count (8–64) with a slider — the app finds the dominant tones and quantizes the photo to match. • Remove background before extracting colors — tap the eraser button to isolate your subject on-device, so busy backgrounds don't pollute the palette. • Pick one of two looks: a PixelOE-inspired smoothing pass for clean flat regions and crisp edges, or Floyd-Steinberg / Atkinson / blue-noise dithering for a softer retro grain (one or the other, not stacked). • Outline tool with three modes — Fast for quick results, Sharp (contrast-aware downsampling) for clean edges on larger canvases, and Lines (XDoG) for a line-art look — bake them in or keep as an editable overlay.

A REAL PIXEL EDITOR, NOT JUST A FILTER • Pencil, eraser, eyedropper, magic wand (flood select), bucket fill, and color replace. • Reference photo overlay so you can keep tracing or fine-tuning while the original photo floats above the canvas at adjustable opacity. • Multi-frame timeline for animations — duplicate frames, drag to reorder, onion-skin between them. • Selection tools with move, copy, paste, and free-form transforms.

WORKS ON iPhone AND iPad • Universal app — same projects, palettes, and editor whether you start on iPhone or iPad. • Portrait and landscape on iPad both supported; opens alongside other apps in Split View.

PALETTES, YOUR WAY • Custom palettes with named colors. Save your favorite color sets and reuse them across projects. • Per-project palettes that travel with the file. • Add, edit, replace, and reorder colors in seconds. Paste a list of hex codes to import multiple colors at once.

EXPORT EVERYTHING • Export PNG with optional transparency and pixel-perfect scale-up (1×, 4×, 16×). • Export GIF for animations, with frame timing controls. • Export the canvas as a JSON color grid, or export your full animation (all frames + palette) as a single JSON file — handy for cross-stitch, perler-bead tools, web games, and sprite scripts. Find exports in the Files app under On My iPhone / iPad - Pick to Pixel.

PROJECTS THAT STAY YOURS • Project library with thumbnail grid: rename, duplicate, delete, organize into folders. • Save with a tap — reopen the canvas right where you saved it. • Atomic writes mean a crash never corrupts your work.

PRIVACY-FIRST, FULLY OFFLINE • No account. No sign-up. No tracking. No analytics. • Your photos never leave your device — no upload, no cloud, no AI service in the loop. • Works in airplane mode.

11 LANGUAGES English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese — automatic from your device language.

WHO IT'S FOR • Game developers and pixel-artists who want a real photo importer with palette control. • Hobbyists turning portraits, pets, or landscapes into 8-bit / 16-bit art. • Cross-stitch and perler-bead crafters who need quantized palettes from photos.

Built by a solo indie developer. Feedback welcome — tap "Send feedback" in Settings - About to email me directly.