Picture Batch CR3 to JPG
CR3 to JPG
CR3 is what Canon has written since the EOS R and M50 arrived in 2018, and it is the raw format most likely to defeat older software: an ISO base media container — structurally a cousin of MP4 — holding Canon's CRAW compression. Anything whose raw support was written for CR2 sees a CR3 as an unknown file. This page decodes it properly, in your browser.
Drop CR3 images here
CR3 files — or any of PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF, GIF or camera raw (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF, ORF, RW2). Everything runs on this device.
Your images never leave this device. They are decoded and re-encoded by your own browser, and the security policy on every page blocks this site from sending them anywhere.
Lossy, no transparency, opens absolutely everywhere, small for photographs.
The standard range for photographs. Hard to distinguish from the original.
Images keep their original dimensions.
JPEG cannot store transparency. Nothing in the queue currently has transparent pixels, so this has no effect yet.
Exif is carried across where both formats can hold it. Nothing currently in the queue has any.
Every pixel gets its two missing colours interpolated from its neighbours, at the full sensor resolution. The slower and more detailed option.
The value your camera recorded when the shutter fired — what you saw on the back of the camera.
Camera, lens, exposure and capture time are written into the JPEG when those fields are present. The file details show whether GPS data exists, but coordinates are deliberately not written, and colour comes out as sRGB.
What happens to your image
Expect a much smaller file than a lossless source, at the cost of some detail.
| Property | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Transparency | Preserved: CR3 images have no transparency to lose. |
| Image quality | Partly preserved: JPEG is lossy: the image is re-compressed and detail is discarded to make the file smaller. The quality control decides how much. |
| Colour | Partly preserved: Converted to sRGB. Decoding an image colour-manages it into the browser's own space, so the output is sRGB and is left untagged, which every viewer reads as sRGB. A wide-gamut source is reported before conversion. |
| Exif metadata | Preserved: Carried across if you leave metadata switched on, or removed completely if you switch it off. Camera, date and any location tag travel together. |
| Orientation | Preserved: Applied to the pixels, and the tag is reset to upright afterwards so nothing rotates the image a second time. |
Why your software refuses a CR3 but opens a CR2
Because they are not related. CR2 was a TIFF with lossless-JPEG sensor data; CR3 wraps its data in the container family used for video, and the sensor data inside is compressed with a scheme Canon introduced with it. Supporting one tells you nothing about the other, which is why the CR3 rollout broke so much software so thoroughly.
It is also why "just update your software" is sometimes not an option: plenty of perfectly good programs stopped being updated before 2018. Converting is the practical answer, and doing it without uploading a card full of photographs to a stranger's server is the point of this page.
CRAW is compressed raw, and that is a choice you already made
Canon bodies offer full raw and CRAW, and CRAW is lossy — a smaller file with some information discarded by the camera. This decoder handles supported variants for known bodies; nothing can reconstruct information the camera did not store.
What that means in practice: if you shot CRAW, the conversion is faithful to what the camera stored, and what the camera stored is already a compressed version of what the sensor saw. That is worth knowing before concluding that a converter lost something.
What happens, in order
The file is identified from its own bytes, not its extension. It is opened and its metadata read, which takes a couple of milliseconds and tells the queue the true sensor dimensions, the camera, the lens and the exposure. The memory a full decode needs is worked out from those real numbers.
Then the sensor data is unpacked, the black level subtracted, the colour filter array interpolated, the camera's colour matrix applied and a tone curve mapped. The result is resized if you asked, encoded as JPEG, given a metadata block built from what the raw file recorded, then reopened, decoded again and compared against the pixels that went into the encoder.
Anything that fails that last comparison is reported as a failure instead of being offered as a download. A converter that hands you a file which is subtly wrong is worse than one that tells you it could not do the job.
If something goes wrong
A file from a very recent Canon body will not decode.
Canon has changed CRAW details between generations, and a body newer than this decoder is the one case that cannot work.
What to do: Adobe's free DNG Converter can often turn it into a more widely supported DNG. The failure message names the camera so you know which files are affected.
Dual Pixel raw files convert, but only to one image.
A Dual Pixel CR3 holds two slightly different views from the two halves of each photosite. Only the primary image is decoded.
What to do: Expected. The second view is only useful to software that can do the Dual Pixel repositioning, which is Canon's own.
The conversion needs more memory than the browser will give it.
A 45-megapixel R5 file needs roughly 750 MB while it is being demosaiced.
What to do: It is decoded at half resolution instead, and the row says so. You can also set half resolution deliberately, which is faster and still produces an 11-megapixel image from a 45-megapixel body.
Questions
Which Canon cameras write CR3?
Everything from the EOS R and M50 onwards, which includes the whole R range and the later Rebel and PowerShot bodies. Earlier EOS bodies wrote CR2, and there is a separate page for those.
Does this work on an iPad or an iPhone?
Yes, in Safari. Raw decoding is memory-hungry, so files convert one at a time on Safari and very large ones are decoded at half resolution — which is deliberate: finishing slowly beats losing the batch to a discarded tab.
Is the JPEG the same as the one my camera would have made?
No. Your camera applies its picture style, its noise reduction and its sharpening. This applies a standard tone curve and nothing else, so the result is flatter and more neutral — closer to what the sensor recorded and further from what the rear screen showed you.