Pick to Pixel: Photo-Pixel Art
Pixel Art Maker, Smart Palette
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Free, fully offline pixel-art studio. Drop a photo, choose colors, edit pixel by pixel. No ads, no IAP, no account.
Turn any photo into editable pixel art — then refine it with a real pixel-by-pixel editor. Pick to Pixel takes the photo you tap, extracts a smart color palette, and converts it into a clean pixel-art canvas you can keep tweaking.
PHOTO TO PIXEL ART, INSTANTLY
• Pick a photo from your gallery, choose a canvas size from 8×8 up to 256×256, and Pick to Pixel renders pixel-perfect art on the spot.
• Smart palette extraction lets you tune the color count (8–64) with a slider — the app finds the dominant tones and quantizes the photo to match.
• Remove background before extracting colors — tap the eraser button to isolate your subject on-device, so busy backgrounds don't pollute the palette.
• Pick one of two looks: a PixelOE-inspired smoothing pass for clean flat regions and crisp edges, or Floyd-Steinberg / Atkinson / blue-noise dithering for a softer retro grain (one or the other, not stacked).
• Outline tool with three modes — Fast for quick results, Sharp (contrast-aware downsampling) for clean edges on larger canvases, and Lines (XDoG) for a line-art look — bake them in or keep as an editable overlay.
A REAL PIXEL EDITOR, NOT JUST A FILTER
• Pencil, eraser, eyedropper, magic wand (flood select), bucket fill, and color replace.
• Reference photo overlay so you can keep tracing or fine-tuning while the original photo floats above the canvas at adjustable opacity.
• Multi-frame timeline for animations — duplicate frames, drag to reorder, onion-skin between them.
• Selection tools with move, copy, paste, and free-form transforms.
WORKS ON iPhone AND iPad
• Universal app — same projects, palettes, and editor whether you start on iPhone or iPad.
• Portrait and landscape on iPad both supported; opens alongside other apps in Split View.
PALETTES, YOUR WAY
• Custom palettes with named colors. Save your favorite color sets and reuse them across projects.
• Per-project palettes that travel with the file.
• Add, edit, replace, and reorder colors in seconds. Paste a list of hex codes to import multiple colors at once.
EXPORT EVERYTHING
• Export PNG with optional transparency and pixel-perfect scale-up (1×, 4×, 16×).
• Export GIF for animations, with frame timing controls.
• Export the canvas as a JSON color grid, or export your full animation (all frames + palette) as a single JSON file — handy for cross-stitch, perler-bead tools, web games, and sprite scripts. Find exports in the Files app under On My iPhone / iPad - Pick to Pixel.
PROJECTS THAT STAY YOURS
• Project library with thumbnail grid: rename, duplicate, delete, organize into folders.
• Save with a tap — reopen the canvas right where you saved it.
• Atomic writes mean a crash never corrupts your work.
PRIVACY-FIRST, FULLY OFFLINE
• No account. No sign-up. No tracking. No analytics.
• Your photos never leave your device — no upload, no cloud, no AI service in the loop.
• Works in airplane mode.
11 LANGUAGES
English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese — automatic from your device language.
WHO IT'S FOR
• Game developers and pixel-artists who want a real photo importer with palette control.
• Hobbyists turning portraits, pets, or landscapes into 8-bit / 16-bit art.
• Cross-stitch and perler-bead crafters who need quantized palettes from photos.
Built by a solo indie developer. Feedback welcome — tap "Send feedback" in Settings - About to email me directly.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Version 1.2 — background removal, adjustable palette size.
• Remove background: tap the eraser button on the palette screen to strip the background using Apple's Vision framework — cleaner palettes from photos with busy surroundings.
• Adjustable color count: use the new Max colors slider (8–64) to control how many colors are pulled from your photo. Default is 24.
The developer, Jun Park, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Jun Park
- Size
- 30.7 MB
- Category
- Graphics & Design
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 13.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 13.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 13.0 or later. - iPod touch
Requires iOS 13.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 11.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 10 more
- English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Bon Standard