The short version: I got tired of image tools that upload your photos to a server, add a watermark, or bury the download button behind three ads. So I built the one I actually wanted to use.
I'm the one person behind this site. No investors, no growth team, no "our mission" written by a committee — just someone who spends a fair amount of time resizing product photos and screenshots and got fed up with the tools that already existed.
A few years back I was uploading listing photos for a small side project and kept hitting the same wall: the marketplace wanted images under 100 KB, my camera was happily producing 4-5 MB files, and every "free" compressor I tried either wrecked the quality, slapped a logo across the corner, or made me wait in a queue behind other people's uploads. One of them, I later found out, was quietly keeping a copy of everything people sent it. That was the last straw.
ImgReduce runs the entire resize and compression process using your browser's own canvas engine — the same technology browsers already use to draw images on a page. That means your photo is decoded, resized, and re-encoded on your own computer or phone. It's not sent to a server, because there's no server call to send it to. I didn't build a "trust us" privacy policy around a backend that could technically see your files — I built it so that isn't even possible.
The other thing I cared about was hitting an actual number. Most compressors let you drag a quality slider and hope. ImgReduce instead takes the number you type in — say, 50 KB — and tests different quality levels until it finds the highest one that still lands under your target. If quality alone can't get there (which happens with very small targets on very large photos), it steps down the dimensions too, a little at a time, rather than just crushing the quality to the floor and calling it done.
This isn't trying to become a full editing suite with filters, crop tools, and a dozen export presets. There are good apps for that already. ImgReduce does two things — hit a target file size, or hit exact pixel dimensions — and tries to do both of those really well rather than adding features nobody asked for.
If something breaks, looks wrong on your phone, or you think a feature is missing, the contact page goes straight to my inbox, not a support ticket system. I read all of it.