I work with images pretty much every day.

Sometimes it’s a photo. Sometimes it’s a screenshot. Sometimes it’s a whole folder of images I’m getting ready to put on a website.

And the same little problem keeps showing up: the files are bigger than they need to be.

A single photo can easily be a few megabytes. That doesn’t sound like much until you start putting several of them on a page. Then suddenly the site feels slower than it should.

So yeah, image compression is not exactly an exciting problem.

But it’s one of those boring little things you end up doing all the time.

There are already plenty of image compressors online. I’ve used a bunch of them.

The thing is, a lot of them somehow make a very simple job feel more complicated than it needs to be.

I just want to make an image smaller.

I don’t want to create an account.

I don’t want to click through five screens.

And I definitely don’t love uploading personal photos, client files, or random screenshots to some server when the whole job could just happen in my browser.

So I built my own.

The Image Compressor on HandyPebble is pretty straightforward.

Drop in a JPG, PNG, or WebP file, choose the quality you want, resize it if needed, and download the result.

If you’re working with a bunch of images, you can do several at once and grab them all as a ZIP when you’re done.

That’s basically it.

One thing I cared about from the beginning was keeping the whole process local.

Your images are processed in your browser.

They don’t get uploaded to HandyPebble.

I don’t see them, and I don’t store them.

For random website graphics, that may not seem like a huge deal. But if you’re working with family photos, work screenshots, client assets, or anything you’d rather not upload somewhere, it matters.

And honestly, if a tool can do the work on your own computer, I think it should.

For website images, I usually start somewhere around 80% quality and see how it looks.

Most of the time, the visual difference is tiny, but the file size drops a lot.

If the image is going on the web, WebP is also worth trying. In a lot of cases, it gives you a smaller file without making the image look noticeably worse.

There’s no big story behind this tool.

I kept needing something like it, so I made one.

Open the page.

Drop in the images.

Compress them.

Download them.

Move on.

That’s kind of the whole idea behind HandyPebble.

Small tools that do one useful thing without turning it into a project.