About CompressPhotos

This site exists for one situation: a folder of photographs is taking up more room than it is worth, and going through it one picture at a time is not a plan.

Why a queue

Most image tools are built around a single picture, which is the right shape when the picture is the point. It is the wrong shape when the picture is one of four thousand and nobody is going to look at any of them today. That job has different requirements: a rule you can state before you start, a record of what happened to every file, and the ability to walk away.

So the working surface here is a ledger rather than a canvas. The tool never shows you a photograph, because deciding about photographs is not what this is for. It shows you rows.

What it will not do

It will not compress one picture down to a stated number of kilobytes. That is a genuinely different instrument — it needs a search, a comparison view and somebody watching — and it is built on a different site by the same people. Sending that job here would be a worse experience pretending to be a broader one.

It will not change what format your photographs are without being asked, it will not rename them, and it will not touch the folder you point it at. Source files are opened for reading and nothing else. Everything it produces lands in a separate archive you save yourself.

How it is built

The whole thing is a static site: some HTML, some JavaScript and a Web Worker. There is no server behind it, no account, no endpoint that could receive a photograph and nowhere for one to be sent. Files are read on this computer and written back to it. Nothing is sent.

The things that are most likely to be wrong are written down rather than hidden. Resume matches a file by its name, its size and the time it was last modified, which is fast and is not a proof of identity. The ceiling of five thousand files is a judgement rather than a measurement. The default of one file at a time is conservative on a machine with sixteen cores. Each of those is a trade made deliberately, and each of them could be made better by somebody with real numbers.

Who makes it

A small group who build single-purpose photo tools, each one narrow enough that its edges can be described honestly on the page. This is the one about folders.