October 4, 2026
How MyTools Helps You as a Walking Tour Guide
Fourteen side tasks around a walking tour guide's week, from audio tour narration to waivers and listing photos, each handled by a free tool in your browser.
Guiding a walking tour is mostly standing on corners. Reading a group of eighteen strangers in the first five minutes, knowing which family will lag behind at the bakery, timing the story about the 1871 fire so it lands right as everyone turns to see the scorched lintel. Pacing, voice, a joke that works in three languages. That is the job.
The rest of it is files. The waiver your insurer wants signed before anyone sets off. The certificate the booking platform asks for again every January. Forty photos from last Saturday, half of them in a format your laptop refuses to open. The self-guided audio version of the tour you recorded on your phone, one stop at a time, in nine separate files of nine different loudness levels. Every one of those is a small job, and every one of them lands in the same week as the tours.
Here are fourteen of those side tasks, with the free MyTools tool that handles each one in your browser. These are online tools for tour guides in the plainest sense: no installation, no account, and your files never leave your computer.
Nine Stops, Nine Recordings, One Audio Tour
You recorded the self-guided version of the old-town route stop by stop, standing in front of each building so the narration matches what the listener sees. That leaves you with nine files on your phone. Nobody buying an audio tour wants to press play nine times.
Merge audio stitches them into one continuous track in the order you set, and lets you add a short crossfade of one to three seconds so the jump from the cathedral to the market square doesn't land as a hard cut. If every file came off the phone as M4A, the merged file stays M4A; mixed inputs default to MP3.
Forty Seconds of Traffic Before Stop Four
Stop four is the bridge. A delivery van idled behind you for the first forty seconds, and the recording opens with an engine, a cough, and you saying "okay, again."
Trim Audio shows the waveform with two handles. Drag the start handle past the van, leave the end where it is, and download the clean take. It takes less time than recording it again, and the van will be back tomorrow anyway.
Narration That Disappears in Earbuds
You spoke quietly at stop seven because it is a churchyard. On a laptop the recording is fine. On a listener's earbuds, walking past the same busy road you just trimmed out of stop four, it is a whisper.
Boost Audio Volume lifts the whole file by a set number of decibels, with a brick-wall limiter that keeps the loudest syllables from crackling. Push it up until it matches the other stops and the listener never reaches for the volume button halfway through.
An Audio Tour Too Heavy to Email
Your finished tour runs fifty-two minutes. A tourist who booked through your website asked you to email it before they fly in, and the file is several times larger than their inbox will accept.
Compress Audio re-encodes it to MP3 at the bitrate you pick, and shows the projected file size before you commit. Speech holds up well at a lower bitrate than music, so you can usually drop a long way before the narration sounds any different.
A Code on the Meeting-Point Sign
"Where does the tour start?" is the most common question you get, and the second is "is there a version I can do on my own?" Both answers belong on the laminated sign at the meeting point.
The QR Code Generator turns the link to your audio tour page into a code people can scan with their phone camera. Download it as SVG and it prints sharp at any size, whether it ends up on the sign, the back of a printed map, or a sticker on your umbrella.
The Insurer's Waiver, Before Anyone Leaves the Square
Your liability insurer sent the waiver as a PDF form. Every adult on the evening ghost tour has to sign it, and you are standing in a square at dusk with a tablet and no printer anywhere in the old town.
Fill PDF lets each guest type their name, date, and emergency contact straight into the form fields in the browser. Download the completed file and it goes in the evening's folder, readable, instead of a stack of damp paper with half the phone numbers smudged.
Three Documents, One Upload for the Booking Platform
The booking platform renews your listing every year. It wants proof of insurance, your city guide licence, and your business registration. There is one upload button.
Merge PDF combines the three into a single document. Drag the pages into the order the platform's checklist uses, so the reviewer finds the insurance certificate first and doesn't send the listing back for a second round.
A Licence Renewal Portal With a Two-Megabyte Cap
The city's renewal portal accepts PDFs up to two megabytes. Your scanned first-aid certificate, made on the phone at the kitchen table, is nine.
Compress PDF shrinks it and lets you pick how hard to compress. Start gentle; scanned text survives a surprising amount of compression before the stamp and signature stop being legible.
The School Group's Itinerary
A history teacher booked you for forty fourteen-year-olds and asked for the day's plan to forward to parents. You wrote it in Word: timings, the toilet stop, the lunch spot, your phone number in bold.
Sent as a .docx, it will open on a dozen phones and a dozen versions of Word, and the table will break on most of them. Word to PDF fixes the layout in place, so every parent sees the same page you do.
Listing Photos That Won't Upload
The booking site asked you to refresh your tour photos. You took good ones last week. They are HEIC files, straight off the iPhone, and the upload form rejects every single one.
Image to JPG converts the whole batch in one go, HEIC, PNG, and WebP alike. You get JPGs the listing accepts, and the photos look exactly the same.
The Rival Who Borrowed Your Photos
A competitor's listing went up in the spring. Their second photo is the shot of the clock tower at golden hour that took you three evenings to get.
Watermark Image stamps your name or logo across a whole batch of photos before you post them. Set the opacity low enough that the photo still sells the tour, and tile the mark across the frame if you want it to survive someone cropping a corner off.
A Stranger's Child in the Group Photo
The end-of-tour group photo is the best one of the season. It also has a family in the background who weren't on the tour, and their daughter is looking straight into the lens.
Blur Image lets you drag a rectangle over each face you don't have permission to show and choose blur, pixelate, or a solid bar. Everyone in your group stays sharp, and the photo can go on your page the same evening.
Noon at the Clock Tower
You filmed four minutes of the tower to catch the figures that come out on the hour. The part people want to see lasts thirty-five seconds, somewhere in the middle.
Trim Video cuts the start and the end off without re-encoding, so the clip keeps exactly the quality you shot it in and is ready almost straight away. Thirty-five seconds is what gets watched in the group chat for next week's bookings.
A Preview Video Over the Listing Limit
Your ninety-second tour preview is in 4K, because that's what the phone records by default. The booking platform caps video uploads well below its size.
Compress Video brings it down with a preset, and lets you drop the resolution to 1080p or 720p if the preset alone doesn't get it under the cap. On a phone screen in a listing carousel, nobody will notice the difference.
Waivers, licences, a clock tower, a churchyard whisper. None of it is guiding. All of it fits into the same week as the Tuesday morning food tour and the Friday night ghost walk.
With the paperwork handled in a browser tab between bookings, the time goes back where it belongs: on the corner by the scorched lintel, waiting until the last straggler catches up before you start the story about the fire.