Dolphin File Converter

Dolphin File Converter brings right-click contextual file conversion to the KDE Plasma desktop and Dolphin file manager, inspired by the popular FileConverter utility on Windows. Built in Python with PySide6 (Qt), the application integrates directly into Dolphin's context menu via KIO service menus and provides a drag-and-drop batch conversion window alongside a headless CLI tool (fileconvert). It coordinates battle-tested open-source backends — FFmpeg, ImageMagick 7, Ghostscript, and LibreOffice — to convert audio, video, images, PDFs, spreadsheets, and office documents without requiring cloud uploads or proprietary converters.

The conversion engine is designed with data safety and workflow reliability in mind. All conversion tasks run inside isolated temporary directories and move to the target destination atomically only upon successful completion, ensuring cancelled or failed conversions never leave orphaned or corrupt files behind. File clash policies prevent accidental overwrites, and an optional original-file cleanup rule strictly moves items to the Trash rather than permanently deleting them. Users can fine-tune quality parameters, maximum video dimensions, audio/video trimming, image resizing, EXIF metadata stripping, and PDF rasterization DPI, saving custom configurations as reusable presets that immediately surface in Dolphin's right-click menu.

To simplify setup across heterogeneous Linux environments, Dolphin File Converter automatically detects missing conversion tools and surfaces distribution-specific package installation commands for Arch Linux, Debian/Ubuntu, and Fedora. The package includes prepared Arch Linux packaging (PKGBUILD) for native installation with makepkg, as well as a single-user installer for any modern Linux distribution.

Highlights

• Native KDE Dolphin integration with direct “Convert to” and configurable “Convert…” right-click menus
• Multi-format conversion across audio, video, images, office documents (DOCX, ODT, RTF), spreadsheets (XLSX, ODS, CSV), presentations (PPTX, ODP), and multi-page PDFs
• Atomic, safe conversion pipeline using isolated temporary directories and conflict-avoidance rules
• Customizable preset engine supporting quality adjustments, video resizing, trim ranges, and metadata stripping
• Headless CLI utility (fileconvert) for terminal workflows and batch scripting
• Integrated missing-dependency diagnostics with distribution-specific package manager instructions
• Prepared Arch Linux packaging (PKGBUILD) and open source on GitHub

View source on GitHub (opens in a new tab).