October 12, 2026
How MyTools Helps You as a Vacation Rental Host
Fourteen side tasks around a vacation rental host's week, from listing photos and damage claims to check-in videos, each solved by a free browser tool.
Hosting a vacation rental is mostly hospitality. Turning the flat around in four hours between a late checkout and an early arrival, knowing which guests want a long welcome and which want the key and silence, keeping the review average above 4.8 while the dishwasher picks the worst possible Saturday to flood. That is the job.
The rest of it is files. Listing photos the platform rejects for being the wrong size. A damage claim that needs evidence a stranger can read in five seconds. The check-in video you filmed sideways in the stairwell. A shoebox of cleaning invoices your accountant wants as one document. None of it is hard, and all of it lands in the same week as three changeovers.
Here are fourteen of those side tasks, each with the free MyTools tool that handles it in your browser. They are online tools for vacation rental hosts in the plainest sense: nothing to install, no account to create, and the files stay on your own computer.
Twenty-Two Listing Photos at the Wrong Size
The photographer delivered twenty-two shots at a resolution your direct booking website chokes on, and the gallery takes so long to load that half your visitors leave before the bedroom appears.
Resize Image takes the whole batch at once. Set a width in pixels with the aspect ratio locked, tick "don't upscale" so the two smaller phone shots aren't stretched, and download the set. The lounge looks the same; the page just stops crawling.
Your Photos, on Somebody Else's Scam Listing
A former guest sends a screenshot. Your sea-view balcony is on a classifieds site, half the price, with a stranger asking for a bank transfer up front.
Add watermark to image puts your property name across every photo you post outside the booking platforms, on your own site or in local Facebook groups. Choose text or your logo, drop the opacity until it doesn't fight the view, and switch on tiling so nobody can crop it out of a corner. The live preview shows exactly where it lands before you download the batch.
The Neighbour's Number Plate in the Garden Shot
The best exterior photo also shows the neighbour's car, plate fully readable, and a family portrait still sitting on the hallway shelf from before you started renting the place out.
Blur image has an "areas only" mode: drag a rectangle over the plate, another over the portrait, and pick blur, pixelate or a solid black bar. Everything else in the photo stays sharp, which matters when the photo is there to sell the garden.
A Burn Mark the Claims Team Can't Miss
The new oak countertop has a ring burned into it, the size of a saucepan base. The platform gives you a short window to file a claim, and the reviewer will spend about five seconds on each photo.
Draw Red Circles opens your photo with a circle tool, an arrow and a text label. Circle the burn, point an arrow at the scorch on the edge, add "new in March" in the corner. You can even paste the photo straight from the clipboard instead of hunting for the file.
Before and After, in One Image
The claim form allows one attachment per item. You have two photos: the countertop on the day it was fitted, and the countertop this morning.
Merge Images sets them side by side with a horizontal layout, a bit of spacing and a white background, and shows the final size in pixels before you export. One file, and the reviewer sees the difference without opening anything else.
The Wi-Fi Password Question at 11 p.m.
"What's the Wi-Fi password?" It is printed in the house manual, on page six. Nobody reads page six.
The QR Code Generator has a dedicated Wi-Fi type: enter the network name, choose WPA/WPA2, type the password, and guests join by pointing their phone camera at the code. Download it as SVG and it prints sharp on the fridge magnet, the welcome card and the frame by the router.
A Signed Rental Agreement for Direct Bookings
Guests who book direct skip the platform's terms, so your own agreement does the work: house rules, deposit, quiet hours. They arrive with a phone, and you have no printer in the flat.
Fill PDF lets you place text, dates and check marks anywhere on the agreement, then add a signature drawn with a finger, typed, or uploaded. Everything is flattened into the downloaded PDF, so the signed copy you file away can't drift.
Last Year's House Manual, Only as a PDF
The co-host who set things up made the house manual in a word processor you no longer have access to. What survives is the PDF. And the boiler was replaced, the recycling day changed, and the bakery on the corner closed.
PDF to Word turns it back into an editable .docx. Pick "flowing text" so the paragraphs reflow when you rewrite them, update the three pages that changed, and export a fresh PDF for the welcome folder.
The Annual Earnings Statement for Your Accountant
In January the platform sends an earnings statement as a PDF: one table, eleven pages, every stay with its payout, fees and taxes. Your accountant wants a spreadsheet.
PDF to Excel pulls the tables into a real .xlsx. Choose "merged into one sheet" so all eleven pages land in a single list you can sort by month, instead of eleven tabs to stitch back together.
A Year of Cleaning Invoices on Your Phone
Thirty-one photos of paper receipts: the cleaner, the laundry service, two locksmiths, a new kettle. Each one a separate JPG with a camera-roll name.
JPG to PDF takes them all as one batch. Drag the thumbnails into date order, set the page size to A4 with small margins, and they come out as one tidy document. It goes to the accountant in the same email as the spreadsheet.
Guest ID Copies on Their Way to Your Co-Host
Where local registration rules ask you to keep a copy of each guest's ID, you end up with a PDF of passport scans that has to reach your co-host before the weekend. It shouldn't sit in an inbox readable by anyone who glances at the screen.
Protect PDF adds an open password with AES encryption, with a strength meter while you type it. Send the file by email and the password by text message, so neither one on its own gives anyone the scans.
Four Minutes of Footage for a Thirty-Second Key Box
You filmed the check-in walkthrough in one take: the street door, the key box, the stairs, the stiff lock on the second floor. It runs four minutes, and three of them are you saying "so, um."
Trim Video gives you a timeline with two handles. Keep the forty seconds that matter and choose "precise" for a frame-accurate cut, so the clip doesn't start halfway through the key box code.
The Walkthrough Filmed Sideways
You held the phone in portrait for the stairs, turned it in the hallway, and the video locked to the wrong orientation. Every guest who opens it tilts their head.
Rotate Video turns it a quarter left or right with a live preview of the result. For a plain rotation of a compatible MP4 the video isn't re-encoded, so the picture loses nothing on the way.
A Check-In Video Too Heavy for the Guest Thread
The finished clip is too large for the platform's messaging thread, and the guest lands in two hours.
Compress Video offers four presets from High to Extreme, plus the option to drop the resolution to 720p or lower. Pick Strong, let it run, and the tool reports the original and compressed sizes side by side so you know it will go through before you hit send.
Fourteen tasks: photos, claims, a password on a fridge magnet, a stack of receipts. None of it is hosting. All of it lives in the same week as the changeovers, the late arrivals and the dishwasher.
With the admin handled in a browser tab, the time goes back where it belongs: in the welcome note on the kitchen table, the extra blanket left out because the forecast turned cold, the guest who writes "it felt like home" in a review. That is the part that made you hand over the keys in the first place.