Consul is Supremely Useful

I’ve become quite fond of Consul, a relatively new file conversion utility that’s both simple to use and easy to automate. The concept is almost absurdly straightforward: change the file extension to the format you want and the conversion just happens.

You might think you’ll never really need to convert files from one format to another. In practice, that assumption tends to collapse sooner or later. A few situations I’ve run into over the years:

• Switching from one e-reader (for example, Sony) to another (Kindle) and suddenly needing to convert an entire library of books.
• My photography workflow revolves around Canon’s RAW format (CR2). When a relative passed away and I inherited his photo archive, the files were a mix of several other RAW formats.
• After living through the minor apocalypse when Microsoft killed Works, you’d think I would have learned something about proprietary formats. Instead, I spent another twenty years writing in Word before finally switching to Markdown.
• Occasionally grabbing an iPhone photo and realizing it exported as HEIC, which remains incompatible with far more things than it should be.
• Optimizing photos and video for my blog or social media.

There are plenty of ways to convert files. Most of them involve some level of friction:

• Opening an app (Word, for example) and using File → Save As to create another copy in a different format.
• Uploading files to random conversion websites with unclear privacy policies.
• Using powerful utilities like Permute, which are excellent but come with a bit of a learning curve.
• Building your own workflow with Apple Shortcuts if you enjoy assembling that kind of plumbing.

What makes Consul such a pleasure is the complete absence of friction. It runs quietly in the background, and when you need to convert something, it just happens the moment you rename the file. For most conversions, the default settings are fine, but in the settings, you can control exactly how each conversion is handled including the output quality and codec, or whether to strip metadata.

For Mac automation nerds, Consul can be set to watch folders and perform conversions when a certain file type lands there. You can use Consul with Hazel or another automation tool like Crank to route the converted file elsewhere, import it into Photos or upload it to an FTP server.

Consul currently supports 1,391 conversions across 76 file formats, covering images, audio, video, documents, e-books, email, configuration files, spreadsheets, and archives.

The developer’s site suggests more formats are planned. I’d particularly like to see support for Apple iWork files and OpenOffice spreadsheets and presentations. My pie-in-the-sky request would be a PDF → EPUB conversion that performs better than what Calibre currently produces.

Pricing is refreshingly simple. A single license is $14, and a three-seat license is $19, both including a year of updates.

The privacy policy is exactly what you want to see: no data collection. Email support is available, and the developer is active on Reddit and notably friendly when people have questions.