ImageBuddy documentation
Drop an image and ImageBuddy trims it to the artwork, keys the background out to transparency, wraps it in a sticker outline, pads it, recolors the backdrop, resizes it, and can trace it to a clean SVG — all over a live preview so every cut-out is obvious at a glance. This page walks through each stage.
Installation
ImageBuddy comes two ways. The download from bendansby.com/apps/imagebuddy is a standard .dmg — open it and drag ImageBuddy.app to your Applications folder. The store version installs and updates the usual way.
Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. The direct-download build auto-updates via Sparkle; you can also check anytime via the app menu's Check for Updates…. The direct build runs a free 7-day trial with every feature unlocked, then a one-time license unlocks unlimited use — buy it on its own or as part of the Surprisingly Useful bundle. The store version is paid through the usual pipeline with no separate license key.
The preview canvas
Drop an image onto the window (or open one with ⌘O) and it appears on a checkerboard, with a striped canvas around it. The checkerboard is the tell: anywhere it shows through the image is a transparent pixel, so every cut-out the pipeline produces is obvious at a glance. Everything renders live — nudge a slider or flip a switch and the preview updates immediately.
A dashed output-bounds frame traces exactly what a Save will write, and a size badge on it reports the pixel dimensions of that output. Because stages like the sticker outline can make the result larger than the source, the badge is the honest measure of what you'll get — watch it as you dial the settings in the right-hand sidebar.
Trim & crop
ImageBuddy's oldest trick: shave the empty border off an image down to the artwork.
Auto trim
Turn on Trim to content and ImageBuddy finds the bounding box of everything that isn't transparent or near-white, and crops to it. A tolerance slider widens or narrows what counts as "empty border" — raise it if a faint edge halo is being kept, lower it if real artwork is being clipped.
Manual crop, rotate & flip
You can also draw a crop by hand, with a loupe for pinpoint placement and arrow-key nudging of the crop edges. Rotate and flip the image in 90° steps to straighten or mirror it before the rest of the pipeline runs.
Remove the background
Turn Key out white on to lift the subject off its background and out to transparency. There are two ways to do it.
White key
The default is a border-connected flood fill: ImageBuddy floods inward from the edges of the image, clearing the connected near-white negative space around the subject. Because it's a flood from the outside in — not a global "make every white pixel transparent" — interior white survives: eye whites, the counters inside letters, the inside of a speech bubble, anything the flood can't reach. A tolerance slider widens "near-white" so off-white or faintly tinted backgrounds still key cleanly.
When you do want the enclosed white pockets gone too, turn on Include internal areas. That switches keying to a global mode that also punches out white regions the border flood can't reach. Leave it off for the safe, subject-preserving default; turn it on as the deliberate, more aggressive choice.
Subject mode
On macOS 14 or later, ImageBuddy can instead lift the salient subject with an on-device Vision cut-out — the system finds the foreground object and masks everything else away, regardless of the background's color. This is the one to reach for on photos and busy backgrounds where "near-white" doesn't describe the thing you want to remove.
Sticker outline
Turn on Sticker outline to wrap the cut-out in a white stroke plus a soft drop shadow — the classic die-cut sticker look. A stroke width slider sets how thick the outline is.
The canvas grows to fit the shadow and then crops tight to the finished result, so the sticker is always snug to its own outline and visible shadow. A practical consequence: the sticker looks identical whether Trim to content is on or off — the outline defines the bounds, not any surrounding margin.
Add padding
Turn on Add padding to grow a transparent margin around the result — the inverse of trimming, so it runs after the trim. Choose a uniform amount that pads all four sides equally, or switch to per-side control to set the top, right, bottom, and left margins independently. Handy for giving an icon consistent breathing room, or for making room before you drop a background behind it.
Add a background
Turn on Add background to composite the image over a backdrop, filling every transparent pixel the earlier stages produced — the inverse of keying white out, and the last stage in the pipeline. Pick a solid color from the built-in color picker (HSB, alpha, and hex), a gradient, or an image to sit behind the subject.
Resize
Scale the output to an exact width × height. An aspect lock keeps the proportions intact so you set one dimension and the other follows — turn it off to stretch to a specific size on purpose.
Vectorize to SVG
ImageBuddy can trace a raster image into scalable vector paths and hand you an SVG. Three modes cover the common cases:
| Mode | What it produces |
|---|---|
| Silhouette | A single filled shape of the subject's outline — the whole cut-out as one solid path. |
| Outline | The subject's edge as a stroked path rather than a filled fill. |
| Full color | Every flat color region traced into its own path, reconstructing the artwork in vectors. |
Once traced, you can export the SVG to a file or copy it straight to the clipboard to paste into a design tool or a web page. Vectorizing shines on logos, icons, and flat illustrations, where the paths stay clean and small.
Split collages
If the image you drop is actually several pictures laid out on one background — a contact sheet or a collage — ImageBuddy notices. It finds the near-white or transparent gutters between the pieces and offers to split the collage into separate files, cropping each piece out and saving them to a folder you pick. This is a one-click operation, separate from the trim / key / sticker pipeline.
Saving
Two save buttons sit at the bottom of the settings sidebar:
- Save Over Original — write the processed image back in place of the file you dropped.
- Save As New… — write to a new file and leave the original untouched.
ImageBuddy preserves the source file's format when it can. But keying, stickering, and padding all introduce transparency, and formats like JPEG and BMP can't hold an alpha channel. When the output has real transparency, ImageBuddy falls back to PNG — a Save Over Original on a JPEG writes a sibling .png and re-points the item at it, so nothing lossy silently flattens your cut-out.
The batch queue
Drop several images at once — or a whole folder — and ImageBuddy queues them in a sidebar on the left, so you can work through them one at a time. Your settings apply to the image you're currently looking at; step through the queue to prep each in turn, saving as you go. The queue drawer appears automatically once more than one image is loaded.
Languages
ImageBuddy is localized into English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Português (Brasil), Русский, and 简体中文. It picks the right language automatically based on your System Settings → General → Language & Region preferences.
To pin ImageBuddy to a specific language without changing system preferences, open System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications, click the + button, and pick ImageBuddy.
Support
Questions or bug reports? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you'll get a reply, usually within a day or two. For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.