Convert CR2 to JPG

A CR2 is a TIFF-derived container that Canon has been writing since 2004, and the reason it is four to six times the size of a JPEG is that it holds the sensor readings at 14 bits per channel rather than a picture at 8. Nothing on a normal computer can draw that directly; it has to be demosaiced first, which means reconstructing full colour from a grid where each photosite recorded only one of red, green or blue.

But the sensor data is not all a CR2 holds. Alongside it Canon writes a complete JPEG, produced by the camera’s own processor at the instant you pressed the shutter, and on almost every EOS body that JPEG is the full pixel dimensions of the sensor. It is what the rear screen shows you, what Windows Explorer and macOS Finder use to draw a thumbnail, and what this converter extracts.

That distinction matters enough to state plainly. This is not a raw developer. The picture that comes out carries whatever picture style the camera was set to — Standard, Faithful, Landscape, Monochrome — along with the white balance the camera chose and its own sharpening and noise reduction. If you shot a frame in Monochrome and expected the colour back, it will not be there, because the colour is in the sensor data and the sensor data is not what was extracted.

For the great majority of people typing "CR2 to JPG" that is exactly right: they want to look at the photograph, attach it to something or upload it, and the camera’s rendering is the one they already approved on the back of the camera. For anyone who wants to recover a blown sky or push two stops of shadow, it is the wrong tool and the CR2 should go to Digital Photo Professional, Lightroom or darktable instead.

On this pair the extracted preview is already a JPEG, so it is never decoded and encoded again. That makes this the one conversion on the site where the metadata question has a real answer in both directions. By default the "Remove metadata" option is on and the EXIF block is edited out of the file before you receive it: shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, lens model, the exact capture timestamp and any GPS coordinates the camera recorded. Turn the option off and every one of those arrives in the JPG exactly as the camera wrote it.

Everywhere else on this site that choice does not exist. A conversion to PNG or WebP decodes to raw pixels and encodes again, which discards metadata whatever the option says. Here it is a genuine switch: leave it on for a photograph going to a stranger or onto a public listing, turn it off when the capture data is part of what you are handing over. Setting a maximum width used to be the way to strip the EXIF and is no longer the right advice — it only worked by forcing a re-encode, which costs a generation of quality to do what the option now does directly. The ICC colour profile is kept in both cases, which is what stops an Adobe RGB frame arriving washed out.

CR2 spans roughly 2004 to 2018 and covers the bulk of the EOS DSLR line: the 5D series through the Mark IV, the 6D and 7D, the 70D and 80D, and every Rebel and xxxD of that era. If your camera has a mirror in it and is not brand new, the files on the card are almost certainly CR2.

Canon’s earliest digital SLRs wrote CRW instead, and from 2018 the EOS R bodies and the newer DSLRs write CR3, which is a different container entirely rather than a version bump. If the files on your card end in .CR3, use the CR3 page instead — the extraction works the same way but the reason people arrive there is different, and it is worth reading.

Expect a substantial drop. A 22-megapixel 5D Mark III CR2 runs around 25 MB and a 30-megapixel 5D Mark IV around 35 MB; the JPEG inside is a normal camera JPEG and typically lands somewhere in the single-digit megabytes. The saving is not compression cleverness, it is the difference between storing sensor readings and storing a picture.

That is the whole appeal for anything with an upload form on the other end. Job application portals, insurance claim uploads, print shop web forms and marketplace listings routinely cap attachments in the low tens of megabytes and refuse .CR2 outright because they have never heard of it.

Drop the whole selection at once. Each file is handled separately with its own progress, and once several are done you can take them together as a ZIP rather than clicking through downloads one by one. Nothing is queued behind other people’s jobs, because the work is happening on your device.

The practical ceiling is 100 MB per file on the free tier, which no Canon CR2 approaches, and after that your own machine. Extraction is cheap — there is no decoder to run, only a scan through the file for the embedded JPEG — so a card’s worth of frames goes considerably faster than it would through a raw developer.

The converter looks for every JPEG inside the file and keeps the largest by pixel count, ignoring anything below 640 by 480 on the grounds that a 160-by-120 thumbnail is a worse outcome than a clear failure. If it finds nothing above that threshold it says so rather than handing you a postage stamp.

When that happens the file has usually not come straight from a camera. CR2 files written out by third-party software, recovered by an undelete tool, or truncated by a card pulled mid-write can be missing the preview or have it damaged. The fix is to go back to the original card copy if one exists; if it does not, the file needs a real raw decoder, which will read the sensor data even where the preview is gone.

Converting does not consume the original, and the original is worth keeping. Everything that makes raw worth shooting — the highlight headroom, the shadow latitude, the ability to change white balance after the fact without a penalty — lives in the 14-bit sensor data and is not present in the extracted JPEG in any recoverable form.

A reasonable working pattern is to extract JPGs for everything so you can browse, share and send immediately, and keep the CR2 files for the handful of frames that will actually be worked on. That way the fast path and the careful path do not compete, and you have not thrown away the thing you cannot get back.

The awkward part of CR2 has always been that no browser and few operating systems will display it. Windows needs a codec pack or the Microsoft Raw Image Extension, macOS supports many Canon bodies but lags new ones, and the file is simply invisible to anything running on the web.

This page needs none of that installed. The extraction is JavaScript running in the tab you already have open, which means it works on a borrowed laptop, a locked-down work machine or a phone, and the file never leaves the device it is on.