PixelThat
Photos into pixel art
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Turn any photo into crisp pixel art on your iPhone. It finds the face, lifts the background and redraws it with a handful of colours. Nothing ever leaves your device.
PixelThat turns a photo into crisp pixel art, right on your iPhone.
Point it at a picture and it does the work a pixel artist would do: it finds the face and frames it the way an avatar is framed, lifts the subject off the background so the edges stay clean, and flattens the colours to a small, deliberate palette chosen from the picture itself, with faces weighted so skin tones survive. Only then does it lay down the pixels.
Everything runs on your device. There is no account, no upload and no queue. The app contains no networking code at all, so it works with the network switched off.
AVATARS THAT FIND THE FACE
• Auto framing puts the head where an avatar's head belongs
• Or drag the selection box yourself: move it, pinch it, tap to jump
• Square, rounded or circle, with a 1 to 4 pixel frame in any colour
BACKGROUNDS ON YOUR TERMS
• Transparent, a flat colour, a two-colour gradient, a pixel-art blue sky with clouds, or keep the photo
• On-device subject cutout with a threshold, grow and shrink, and a live preview when it needs a nudge
PALETTES WORTH KEEPING
• A palette built from your own picture, in CIELAB, with faces weighted
• Paste your own hex colours
• Floyd-Steinberg and ordered 2x2, 4x4 and 8x8 dithering
FINE CONTROL WHEN YOU WANT IT
• Sizes from 8 to 256 pixels, or any width from 4 to 512, with the common sizes previewed side by side
• Auto levels, ink edges and outlines
• Contrast, saturation, brightness and gamma
• Fine zoom, pan and mirror
• Hold to compare with your photo, with undo and redo
RECENTS THAT REMEMBER
Every picture you keep is filed with the settings that made it. Tap it later to put those settings on a different photo, which is how you make a set of avatars that match.
EXPORT
Save the enlarged copy to Photos, which is what most sites want for an avatar, or share both the real pixels and the enlargement.
PRIVACY
PixelThat collects nothing. No account, no analytics, no advertising identifier, no tracking and no network requests of any kind.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
A new icon and a simpler editor, with sharper, faster pixel art.
The developer, Mohammed Shehada, 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
- Mohammed Shehada
- Size
- 2.1 MB
- Category
- Photo & Video
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 CS42