DDS (DirectDraw Surface) is the texture format games load straight onto the graphics card: the skins, terrain and UI in Skyrim, Fallout, The Sims, Minecraft resource packs, flight simulators and almost every PC game mod. Windows Photos, Paint, phones and most image editors can't open it, and games can't load a PNG in its place, so modders spend a lot of time converting one way and the other with command-line tools or Photoshop plugins.
This page does both directions in the browser. DDS files open with every face and mip level visible and convert to PNG, JPG or TGA; PNG, JPG, TGA and other images become DDS in the compression your game expects, with a full set of mipmaps. Drop a whole folder at once and download the results as a .zip. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline.
- Which DDS compression should I choose?
- For most mods, DXT5 (BC3) for textures with transparency and DXT1 (BC1) for those without: every game and tool reads them. BC7 looks better, especially on gradients, but needs a game from the DirectX 11 era or newer (Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4 read it, the original Skyrim does not). Normal maps keep the most detail as BC5, and single-channel masks as BC4. If a game's own files use one format, match it.
- Do I need mipmaps?
- For textures on 3D models and terrain, yes: mipmaps are the smaller copies a game uses at a distance, and without them textures shimmer and sparkle as you move. Leave them off for interface images, fonts and anything always shown at full size. Most games that ship mipmaps expect them in your replacement too.
- Why does my DDS look different after converting it back?
- DXT1, DXT5 and BC7 are lossy, like JPG: each 4 by 4 block of pixels is squeezed into 8 or 16 bytes, so fine detail and smooth gradients change slightly. Converting DDS to PNG is exact, but every round trip through a compressed DDS loses a little more. Keep your PNG or TGA originals and convert from those, and use Uncompressed when you need the pixels exactly.
- Can it open BC6H HDR textures?
- Yes. BC6H and the floating-point formats hold brightness beyond white, which a PNG cannot, so they are tone-mapped for the preview and for PNG, JPG and TGA: bright areas roll off smoothly instead of clipping. Converting to DDS here writes an ordinary 8-bit format, not BC6H.
- What happens to a cubemap?
- Converted to PNG, JPG or TGA, each of the six faces becomes its own file (_posx, _negx and so on), which is how skybox tools expect them. Converted to DDS, it stays a single cubemap file. Texture arrays become one file per slice.
- Are my textures uploaded?
- No. Decoding and compression run in your browser, using a WebAssembly build of open-source texture codecs, so unreleased mod assets stay on your computer. Large batches with BC7 at Best quality take a while because all the work happens on your machine.