I had 300 product photos sitting in a folder. White backgrounds, mostly. I needed them on transparent backgrounds for a client's Shopify store. The obvious move: upload them to some online background remover. Five minutes, done.
Then I thought about it. These were unreleased product shots. Uploading them to a random server felt wrong. Plus, I'd have to do this every month when new products came in. I wanted something that ran locally.
Browsers can do this now. The question was how well.
Two approaches, one browser tab
There are two practical ways to remove backgrounds in the browser without sending pixels to a server:
