I Didn’t Want to Open Photoshop for This

I take a lot of photos.

Sometimes I’ll go out for an afternoon, come back home, dump everything onto the computer, and suddenly I have a folder full of huge image files.

The photos look great.

The file sizes do not.

A few megabytes here, ten megabytes there. If I want to put them on a website, send a bunch by email, or just make the folder a little less ridiculous, I usually need to compress them first.

And every time, I have the same thought:

Do I really need to open Photoshop for this?

Photoshop is great. I’ve used professional image software for years.

But sometimes I don’t want a professional image editor.

I don’t want to create a document, import twenty photos, find the export settings, choose the quality, pick a folder, and repeat the whole thing again.

I just want the files to be smaller.

That’s it.

So one day I decided to make a tiny browser tool for myself.

It took me about an hour to get the first useful version working.

Drop in the photos.

Choose how much compression you want.

Download the smaller copies.

No installation. No account. No complicated interface.

Just open the page and use it.

I also wanted the images to stay on my computer.

It always feels a little strange to upload a folder of personal photos to some random server just because I want to shave a few megabytes off the file size.

There really shouldn’t be a server involved at all.

So the compression happens right in the browser.

The first version wasn’t anything impressive.

Honestly, it was just one of those little tools I made because I was annoyed enough to make it.

But then I kept using it.

That’s usually a good sign.

I adjusted a few things, made batch processing easier, cleaned up the interface, and eventually added it to HandyPebble.

There are much bigger and more powerful image tools out there.

This isn’t trying to replace them.

Sometimes you need Photoshop.

And sometimes you have twenty vacation photos that are way too big and you just want to make them smaller before dinner.

For that, this little thing works pretty well.

Open the Image Compressor →