Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your ZIM file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert ZIM to another file type
To convert ZIM archives to another format, you need Kiwix or other Compressed software.
Convert a file to ZIM
To convert other file formats to the "Offline Wiki Content Archive" file type, you need software like Kiwix or a similar tool.
About ZIM files
The .ZIM file format is primarily used as an Offline Website Content Archive, most notably for distributing offline copies of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Developed by the openZIM project and accessed using Kiwix, a .ZIM file essentially packages HTML, CSS, images, and search indexes into a single compressed archive using LZMA2 or Zstandard compression. Additionally, the .ZIM extension is occasionally used by Zim Desktop Wiki as notebook configuration files. While highly efficient for offline reading, .ZIM files present major disadvantages for standard users. They are a highly specialized, closed-off archive format. You cannot natively browse or edit the internal HTML pages using standard web browsers or text editors without specialized software. Furthermore, because these archives can exceed 100GB in size (in the case of the entire English Wikipedia), extracting specific articles or assets becomes extremely cumbersome. Users typically want to convert or extract .ZIM files to raw HTML pages to view them natively, or to ZIP and TXT to access the text and images for independent use. Converting a .ZIM file is difficult because the internal directory structure and compression chunks are custom-built for reading performance rather than standard extraction. Often, only the original software or dedicated command-line tools like zimdump can properly read or export the data. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your ZIM file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert ZIM file to PDF, HTML, TXT, ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, LZMA or CAB, you can use Kiwix or similar software from the "Offline Website Content Archive" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert XXE, 7Z, Z, PAK, LHA, DEB, UUE, TAR, LZH, ZIP, PKG or RAR files to ZIM, try Kiwix or another comparable tool in the "Offline Website Content Archive" category.
The ZIM Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our ZIM converter.