Every content creator has a moment. You finish the post, you go to publish the image, and suddenly you are bouncing between four apps to crop, resize, convert, watermark, and re-export. Each app takes five seconds. The whole stack takes four minutes. Multiply by three posts a week and you have lost two hours a month to plumbing you did not sign up for.
I replaced the four with one open source Android app called Image Toolbox. After a week of running it through my real shipping workflow, I am not going back. The reason is not the feature list. The reason is that putting everything on one canvas kills the small friction costs that quietly add up to a real tax on your week.
Where the time actually goes
A multi-app image workflow does not waste time because any single tool is slow. It wastes time because of the handoff. Every time you save a file in one app and open it in another, you pay a few seconds for the share sheet, another few seconds to re-import, and a small piece of mental energy to remember what you were doing. You also leak metadata at every stop, since each new app wants storage permissions and may want analytics too. Across a week of posting, that adds up to about twenty minutes I had been writing off as “just how editing works.”
The bigger problem is choice. When you have four apps, you spend a small amount of decision energy picking which one to use for which step. That sounds trivial. It is not. Decision fatigue is real, and image editing is exactly the kind of work where you should not be spending any of it.
What is actually in the toolbox
The whole project lives in one GitHub repository under an Apache 2.0 license (a permissive open-source license that lets you audit the code, fork it, or repackage it without legal surprises). It is written in Kotlin (Android’s official programming language) and uses Coil (a Kotlin-native image loader) for the heavy lifting. The same maintainer publishes a companion library called Image Toolbox Libs that powers most of the visual tools, which keeps the app’s behavior consistent across resize, crop, watermark, and export.
There are 61 export presets built in. Most of them are sized for destinations I already use, like Instagram, X, and YouTube. Some are for places I had not thought about, like Etsy thumbnails or specific Discord banner sizes. The presets save the “Google the exact pixel count” step, which on its own is worth the install. You can also run the same preset as a batch job across a folder of photos, which is the closest thing to a magic button the app has.
Background removal is the other piece that changed my workflow. The app ships four models under the hood: MlKit, U2Net, RMBG, and BiRefNet. You do not need to know what those names mean. What matters is that you can swap between them on the same image when one model mangles hair edges or fabric, instead of being stuck with whatever the developer picked for you. For thumbnails and product shots, that flexibility turns a hit-or-miss operation into a reliable one.
How it feels to actually use it
Setup is short. The app asks for the usual Android permissions to read your photos and send notifications, plus a small opt-out for update checks. That last toggle is a thoughtful touch for anyone who prefers their tools to stay quiet.
The visual design leans on Android’s Material You (the theming system that pulls accent colors from your wallpaper). On my phone the sidebar inherited a purple accent straight from the wallpaper, then I enabled Amoled Mode for a true-black interface and pinned the theme to Dark so nothing surprises me at night. None of this is required, but it shows the developer cared about how the app feels in the hand.
Editing lives behind one canvas with everything stacked on it. As a stress test I pulled the quality slider on a 3.8 MB photo down to 7 percent. The result looked like an oil painting with the realism sanded off, and the file dropped to about 128 KB. Resize and rotate buttons sit right under the preview, and an Exif editor (a tool for the metadata that cameras and phones stamp on every photo: capture date, GPS, camera make, compression settings, and so on) sits in the same panel so you can fix metadata in the same pass.
- Single canvas, dozens of tools, no tab switching
- Sliders that respond in real time
- Metadata controls beside the visual edits
- File size feedback as you adjust quality
Trade-offs
If you only ever crop and resize, this app will feel like overkill on day one. The single canvas is a toolbox, not a focused single-purpose editor, and smaller utilities do pile up in the same panel as you scroll. Defaults are sensible, so the basic workflow works without opening the advanced settings, but the surface area is real and you should know it upfront.
Background removal also demands a real choice. Each model has its own personality:
- MlKit finishes in a second but misses fine edges.
- BiRefNet takes noticeably longer and uses more battery, but the cutouts are clean.
- RMBG splits the difference.
- U2Net handles plain backgrounds cheaply and everything else slowly.
Run a few real photos through each before settling on a workflow. That twenty minutes upfront saves you from redoing shots later.
The install path is also worth flagging. The project distributes an APK (Android application package, the installable file format) from its release page rather than publishing on the Play Store. If sideloading is fine with you, you are ten minutes from a working setup. If you would rather wait for a first-party channel, bookmark the project and check back. The maintainer has shipped updates consistently, so patience will probably pay off.
Trying it without committing
Cheapest test: pick one image you actually plan to post. Install the APK, skip the optional update prompt, and set the theme to Dark with Amoled Mode on if your phone has an OLED display (a panel where each pixel emits its own light, so true black means the pixel is off). Run the image through the Instagram preset, then a background removal pass with BiRefNet, then a simple watermark. The whole thing should take less time than reading this paragraph. If the speed feels right and the output looks good, you have found your new default.
If sideloading is not your thing, hold off and watch for a first-party channel. That is a fair line to draw.
What I would tell past me
If I could send a message back to the version of me that had four image apps on his phone, I would say three things.
- Pick the background removal model on purpose. The fastest one is not the best one. Spend an evening running real photos through each before you commit.
- Skip 90 percent of the toolbar on day one. Crop, resize, watermark, export. That is the whole workflow. Everything else is for the day you actually need it.
- Disable the update check at first launch. One tap, and the right call if you prefer your tools to phone home less.
If you ship images to social platforms from your phone and you would rather not pay for a subscription or juggle five utilities, Image Toolbox is worth twenty minutes of your time. Run one real photo through it. That is all it takes to know whether the consolidation sticks.