Grabio - File & Media Toolkit: 39 iPhone File Tools

How many single-purpose apps have you installed just to shrink one photo under a form’s upload limit, or to open a HEIC that someone’s Android phone refused? Grabio folds that whole pile into a single Share Sheet entry: 39 file utilities, no App Store download, no login.

What it does

Grabio lives in the iOS Share Sheet. Tap Share on a photo, PDF, video, or webpage, choose Grabio, and a menu of tools opens. The 39 utilities split into 23 free and 16 Pro, grouped into compressors that hit an exact KB target, format converters (HEIC to JPG, image and audio formats), a full set of PDF actions, white-background fill, EXIF and GPS stripping, a clean webpage-to-PDF saver, QR decoding, and a 30-second ringtone exporter. Processing runs on the developer’s server, so you need a connection while a job is working.

Installing it

1. Tap Add Shortcut on this page to open it in the Shortcuts app on an iPhone running iOS 16 or later.
2. Scroll the preview to the bottom and tap Add Shortcut to confirm.
3. Open Share on any file and pick Grabio to run it once. No extra apps and no account are needed.

Putting it to work

Day to day, you trigger Grabio from wherever the file already sits. Share a 4 MB photo straight from Photos, pick a compressor, and it comes back at the size a form will actually accept. Outputs follow a tidy save flow now: photos, videos, and GIFs go to Photos, while PDFs and audio drop into Files under Shortcuts → Download, each tagged with “grabio” in the filename so you can find them again. Portrait shots also keep their orientation through compress, resize, and background-fill steps, which earlier builds sometimes flipped.

What people use it for

• Compressing a 4 MB camera photo down to an exact 100 KB for a college or visa portal.
• Converting a stack of HEIC photos to JPG for an Android friend who can’t open them (Pro batch tool).
• Replacing a product photo’s background with clean white for an Etsy or Amazon listing (Pro).
• Saving a long article as an ad-free PDF to read offline, without a read-later account.
• Cutting a 30-second .m4r ringtone from a song without ever opening GarageBand (Pro).

Where it falls short

Grabio processes files on a server, so it does nothing offline, and the free tier caps you at five actions a day. Sixteen of the 39 tools sit behind Pro at $3 a month or $30 a year (AI background removal, video conversion, batch jobs, ringtone export, QR generation), which raises the cap to 30 daily. It also is deliberately not a social-media downloader; that feature was pulled in v3.0.0, and for clips the author points people to cobalt.tools instead.

Quick answers

Is the free version actually usable, or just a teaser?

Five actions a day, with no watermark and no signup, covers most weeks for most people, like the odd form photo or a webpage saved to read later. You only reach for Pro when you need the AI, video, and batch tools.

Where do my files go, and how private is it?

Saved output lands in Photos or in Files under Shortcuts → Download. On the server side, files sit in a locked temp folder and are deleted within an hour, your device ID is hashed before it leaves the phone, and no ad network or third-party tracker is involved.

Can it grab Instagram or TikTok videos?

That is the one job it won’t take. URL media saving was removed back in v3.0.0, so the Shortcut sticks to files you already have on the device. For social clips the author recommends the free, open-source cobalt.tools.

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