Open a ZIP file
See what is inside an archive and take out the files you actually want. The ZIP is never stored, so it works for things you would not send to a website.
- Never stored
- No queue, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your ZIP
Drop it in, or pick it from your device. Nothing is sent anywhere — the file is read where it already is.
Look inside
Every file is listed with its size and its folder, before anything is unpacked. A large archive lists instantly because a ZIP carries a catalogue that can be read on its own.
Take what you want
Download a single file, or take everything at once as a fresh ZIP. Only what you ask for is actually unpacked.
What comes out, and what will not
Two of the ZIP format's compression methods are readable here — stored and deflate — and between them they account for essentially every .zip in circulation. They are not the only ones the format permits. 7-Zip and WinZip will both happily write a .zip whose entries are LZMA, bzip2, PPMd or zstd, and one of those lists perfectly here, with every name and size correct, and then declines to extract, naming the method number it found. That is a limit of this reader rather than a problem with your archive, and a desktop archiver opens it without comment.
Names are the other place a ZIP is less definite than it looks. The format records whether its names are UTF-8 in a single flag bit, and archives made by older Windows tools do not set it. When the flag is missing, a name is read as UTF-8 if it can be and as Windows-1252 if it cannot — which keeps every ASCII name exactly right and turns a Japanese or an accented DOS-era name into mojibake. The file itself is untouched; only its label is wrong, and renaming it after download costs nothing.
Taking everything at once builds a new ZIP here rather than handing you the one you supplied. Entries are re-deflated, apart from the formats that are already compressed, which are stored as they are; the modification dates from the original are carried across and clamped into the range a ZIP can represent, which runs from 1980 to 2099; and the names are flagged as UTF-8 so that accented ones survive unzip on macOS and Linux. Permissions are not carried, because they are never read — nothing here looks at an entry's unix mode. A symbolic link inside a ZIP is not recognised as a link either, and comes out as the small file it physically is, containing the path it pointed at.
The refusals have numbers behind them, and they are worth stating rather than describing. Fifty thousand entries; one gigabyte for any single file; two gigabytes across the whole archive; and an expansion-ratio check that only engages once something has grown past a hundred megabytes and more than a thousandfold, so an ordinary text archive that compresses brilliantly is never mistaken for an attack. Sizes are charged from the catalogue before anything is decompressed, which means a lie in the catalogue stops the extraction rather than the tab.
When you want something else
Everything here ends in a download, and that shapes what it is good for. Files are saved one at a time into wherever your browser puts downloads, with no folder structure; taking everything gives you another ZIP to unpack locally, which is a round trip your own operating system could have skipped entirely — every current Windows, macOS and Linux desktop opens a ZIP with nothing installed. Use this page when the archive is somewhere awkward, or when you want to see inside before committing to it, rather than as a replacement for double-clicking the file.
A few shapes are not recognised at all and fail as "not an archive" rather than as a feature that is missing. A multi-part set — .z01 and its siblings, or .part1.rar — is not joined: only the file you dropped is opened, and the rest of the data is in the ones you did not. A self-extracting .exe is a program with an archive inside it, and is not identified as an archive here. Nor is a nested archive unpacked recursively; a .tar inside a .zip comes out as a .tar. 7-Zip handles all three, and it is free.
Frequently asked questions
Is my ZIP stored anywhere?
No. Nothing is stored and nothing is kept, and it keeps working with the Wi-Fi switched off once the page has loaded. That matters more for archives than for most files — a zip of your tax returns or a backup of a folder is exactly the kind of thing that should not be handed to a stranger's server.
Which formats can it open?
ZIP, TAR, TAR.GZ and TGZ, GZ, RAR (both RAR4 and RAR5) and 7z. The file is identified by what is inside it rather than by its extension, so an archive someone renamed still opens.
Can it open a password-protected ZIP?
It will show you what is inside — the file names and sizes are not encrypted in a ZIP, which is worth knowing in itself — but it cannot read the contents. ZIP encryption comes in two kinds and the modern one (AES) has no browser-native implementation we can use under a permissive licence. The page tells you plainly which files are locked rather than handing back scrambled bytes.
Is there a size limit?
Available memory, rather than a fixed size cap. Very large archives are opened a file at a time where the format allows it, so a big ZIP lists instantly and only the file you ask for is unpacked.
Is it safe to open an archive from someone I do not know?
Archives are the one kind of file whose CONTENTS can be hostile, so two old attacks are handled before you see anything. A file inside an archive can be named "../../something" to try to escape the folder it is unpacked into — those names are clamped and you are told which ones were changed. And an archive can be a few kilobytes that unpacks to terabytes, which would take the browser tab down with it; that is measured and refused rather than attempted.
Why are some file names different from what the archive says?
Because a name inside an archive is not always a name a computer can safely use. Anything trying to climb out of its folder with "../", an absolute path, a Windows drive letter, a reserved device name like CON, or an invisible character used to disguise an extension is corrected — and every correction is listed, so you can see exactly what was changed and why.
It says my file is not a ZIP, but it ends in .zip
Then it is almost certainly not a ZIP. Files get renamed to slip past mail filters, and a RAR or a 7z called ".zip" is common. The page reads the first few bytes and tells you what the file really is — and if it is a format we can open, it just opens it.
Good to know: Encrypted entries cannot be opened here — no password is ever asked for. They are still listed, with their names and sizes, because a ZIP keeps its catalogue unencrypted; it is only the contents that stay out of reach, and they are marked with a padlock rather than failing silently. Very large archives are held in memory while extracting, so a multi-gigabyte ZIP will struggle on a phone.
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