Open ZIP File Online

Drop the .zip onto the box above, or click it to browse. The archive is read straight away and its contents appear as a folder tree — click any file to preview it, and use Download to save one file or all of them. There is nothing to install, no account, and no upload step.

No. The archive is read in your browser's memory using the HTML5 File API and unzipped locally with JavaScript. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored, and no copy exists anywhere but your own device. You can prove it: open your browser's Network tab, load a ZIP, and watch that no request goes out. It also means the tool keeps working with your Wi-Fi off.

Completely free — no account, no subscription, no ads, no watermark, no daily cap. The only real limit is memory: the whole archive has to fit in a browser tab, which in practice means roughly 1–2 GB depending on the device.

There is no hard limit in the tool, but a browser tab can usually address 1–2 GB before it runs out of memory, and a mobile browser considerably less. Archives up to a few hundred megabytes are comfortable. Above about 1.5 GB the page will warn you and suggest a desktop tool instead, because a crashed tab helps nobody.

Yes — use ⬇ All. Each file is saved individually rather than re-packed, so your browser will show a save prompt or a run of downloads; above 60 files it asks for confirmation first. If you want a single folder on disk, it is usually less friction to save the ZIP and use your operating system's own extractor.

Yes. Select a nested archive and an Open button appears next to Download — it loads that inner archive in place, and the header keeps a breadcrumb of where you are. Nested archives are common in build artefacts, backups and email exports.

Text and code render as text; images as images; audio and video get a player; PDFs open in an inline viewer. That covers .txt, .md, .csv, .json, .xml, .html, .css, .js and most source-code extensions, plus PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, SVG, MP3, WAV, MP4, WebM and PDF. Anything else falls back to a hex-and-ASCII dump of the first bytes, which is often enough to identify an unknown file.

Rendering tens of megabytes of text into the DOM will freeze a tab, so files over about 24 MB are not rendered and very long ones are truncated at 400,000 characters with a note. The full file is always intact — use Download to save it and open it in a proper editor.

No. RAR and 7z are entirely different formats with their own compression algorithms, not ZIP variants, and nothing here can read them. You will get a clear message rather than a silent failure. For those, use 7-Zip (free, Windows), Keka (macOS) or your distribution's archive manager.

Not currently — those are tar archives, usually gzip-compressed, and they use a different container format from ZIP. On Windows 11 and every Mac and Linux system, tar files can be extracted from the built-in file manager or with tar -xzf archive.tar.gz at a terminal.

Because they are ZIP files. Office documents (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx), OpenDocument files, Java .jar files, Android .apk packages, EPUB books and .cbz comics all use ZIP as their container — the extension just tells the operating system what the contents mean. Dropping one in is a quick way to see the XML, images and manifests inside.

Unzip one and you will find word/document.xml holding the text and formatting, word/media/ with every embedded image at full resolution, docProps/ with author and revision metadata, and [Content_Types].xml describing the parts. It is a genuinely useful way to pull original-quality images out of a document, or to check what metadata a file is carrying before you send it.

No. Encrypted archives — whether legacy ZipCrypto or AES — cannot be opened here, because the unzipping library does not implement decryption and browsers expose no ZIP-specific crypto. You will get an explicit message saying so rather than a corrupt-file error. Use 7-Zip, WinRAR or macOS Archive Utility, which prompt for the password.

Usually yes in principle — standard ZIP encryption protects file contents but leaves the central directory listing readable, which is a well-known weakness of the format. This tool stops at the encryption error rather than partially listing, to avoid implying it can do more than it can. Only ZIP files created with an encrypted header hide their names too.

Three common causes. The download was incomplete, so the central directory at the end of the file is missing — re-download and compare file sizes. The file is not really a ZIP despite its extension — check the hex preview or the first bytes, which should be PK. Or it is a multi-part archive (.z01, .part1.rar), which needs every part present and a desktop tool to reassemble.

It is the ZIP magic number — the initials of Phil Katz, who created the format in 1989. Every ZIP begins with the bytes 50 4B, which render as PK. If you open an unknown file and see PK in the first two bytes, it is a ZIP or something built on ZIP, whatever the extension claims.

Two numbers are in play. Unpacked is the original size of the file; in archive is how many bytes it occupies after compression. Your operating system usually shows the first for extracted files and the second for the archive as a whole. The Saved figure is the difference between them across the whole archive.

Because they were already compressed. JPEG, PNG, MP3, MP4 and PDF all use compression internally, so re-compressing them gains almost nothing — sometimes a fraction of a percent. Plain text, source code, CSV, XML and uncompressed bitmaps compress dramatically, often by 70–90%. The bar next to each file shows how much each one actually saved.

Yes. On iOS, tapping the drop zone opens the Files picker, so you can reach ZIPs in iCloud Drive, Downloads or another app's folder. Android works the same through its file picker. Mobile browsers have less memory than desktop, so very large archives are more likely to fail there — and previews of big video files may not play smoothly.

Once the page and the unzip library have loaded, the unzipping itself is entirely local, so it keeps working if the connection drops. The library is fetched from a CDN on first load, so a genuinely cold start does need a connection — after that, a cached page will open archives on a plane.

Usually one of three things. The file is not a ZIP-family format — RAR and 7z are silently different. A script blocker prevented the unzip library loading from cdnjs, in which case you will see a message about it. Or the archive is very large and still being read; the progress bar at the top shows that it is working.

The privacy question is genuinely answered: the file never leaves your device, so there is no server to trust and nothing to retain. The usual caution still applies to content — previewing a file does not scan it for malware, and an executable inside an archive is exactly as risky here as anywhere else. Previews render in the page, so treat unknown HTML and SVG with the same care you would anywhere.

None. There is no account, no server-side processing and no storage of file contents. The site uses privacy-first analytics that count page views without cookies or personal profiles, and that is the extent of it.

Yes — a ZIP is just a container, and it will happily carry anything, which is exactly why malicious email attachments so often arrive zipped. Opening the archive to look at the listing is safe; running an executable you find inside is not. Be especially wary of .exe, .scr, .js, .vbs and macro-enabled Office files from senders you do not know.

A deliberately crafted archive that expands to an enormous size — the classic 42.zip is 42 KB and unpacks to 4.5 petabytes through nested layers. Because this tool only reads what you click rather than extracting everything at once, a bomb will not silently fill your disk, though asking it to preview a pathological entry can still exhaust the tab's memory.

A single file that bundles many files and folders together, usually compressed to take up less space. It was created by Phil Katz in 1989 and became the default archive format on every major operating system. Each entry is compressed independently, which is why you can read one file out of an archive without unpacking the whole thing — precisely what this page does.

Zipping does two jobs at once: archiving, meaning many files become one, and compressing, meaning those files take up fewer bytes. They are separable — tar archives without compressing, gzip compresses a single file without archiving, and a ZIP can even store files uncompressed if compression would not help.

Almost always Deflate, a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding dating from 1993 and still the most widely supported option. The format also allows Deflate64, BZIP2, LZMA and others, but support for those varies by tool, which is why most software still writes plain Deflate for maximum compatibility.

No. ZIP compression is lossless — the extracted bytes are identical to the originals, and the CRC32 checksum stored with each entry proves it. That is different from JPEG or MP3, which are lossy formats that discard detail permanently. Zipping a photo does not degrade it; it just makes the container smaller.

A 32-bit checksum computed from the file's contents and stored in the archive when it is created. Extractors recompute it and compare, which is how corruption gets caught. It is a good integrity check but not a security one — it detects accidental damage, not deliberate tampering, for which you would want a cryptographic hash.

macOS stores extra metadata — resource forks, Finder attributes — in parallel files beginning with ._, and its built-in compressor tucks them into a __MACOSX folder. They are harmless and can be ignored or deleted. They look like clutter on Windows, which is why Mac-made archives often seem to have twice as many files as expected.

Not currently — this is a reader. It opens, browses, previews and extracts, but it does not write archives or modify the one you loaded. Every operating system has a built-in way to create a ZIP: right-click and Compress on macOS, Send to → Compressed folder on Windows, or zip -r name.zip folder at a terminal.

Most of them upload your archive to a server, unpack it there and hand you a download link — which means your files sit on someone else's disk, subject to their retention policy, and there is usually a size cap and a queue. This one does the work in your browser, so there is no upload, no waiting, no cap beyond your own memory, and nothing to delete afterwards.

JSZip, a well-established open-source JavaScript library for reading and writing ZIP files, loaded from a public CDN. It handles the container parsing and Deflate decompression; everything around it — the tree, previews, compression figures and downloads — is this page.