A CBR is a RAR full of images; a CBZ is a ZIP full of the same images. This swaps the container and leaves every page exactly as it was — no re-encoding, no quality loss, no page renumbering.
Comic archives are just archives
That is why the conversion is lossless and fast: the pages are copied across without being opened. A converter that offers you a quality setting here is decoding and recompressing your artwork for no reason.
Why CBZ is the better container
Converting once means the file works in whatever you read it on later, including devices you do not own yet.
Page order
If the pages were misordered inside the CBR — usually because they were numbered 1, 2, 10 without leading zeros — they will be misordered in the CBZ too. That is a property of the source, and silently renaming files to fix it would be a worse surprise than leaving it alone.
What is kept and what is not
The folder structure is kept, including nesting. Files are written back under the same paths they had inside.
What does not survive the change of container is everything Unix-specific: file permissions, ownership, and the executable bit. ZIP can store some of that and most Windows tools ignore it, so relying on it would be worse than saying plainly that it is gone. Symbolic links are skipped rather than turned into broken files, and you are told which ones.
Other names for this
Also searched as “cbr to cbz converter”, “comic book rar to zip”, “cb7 to cbz”.
Questions
- Does the image quality change?
- Not at all. The images are copied byte for byte from one container to the other and never decoded.
- Is my archive uploaded?
- No. It is opened and repacked inside this tab. An archive is usually the whole of something — a project, a case file, a set of photographs — so uploading one to a converter hands over all of it at once. Turn your Wi-Fi off before you start and this still works.
- My CBR is really a ZIP. Does that work?
- Yes. The format is detected from the file’s bytes rather than its name, and mislabelled comic archives are extremely common. You will get a note saying what it really was.
- Can it open password-protected archives?
- Yes — enter the password in the options. Encrypted entries are otherwise skipped and you are told how many. The password is used here and never sent anywhere, which is the whole argument for a local tool: uploading an encrypted archive together with its password to a stranger’s server defeats the encryption entirely.
- Is there a size limit?
- Your device’s memory, and a deliberate ceiling of 2 GB unpacked and 20,000 files. Those are not commercial limits — they are the point past which a browser tab stops being the right tool, and past which the file is more likely to be a decompression bomb than a real archive.