Building Tinypic - Secure & Fast Image Compression Tool

💡 WebP should be a go-to image format for all images used by modern web apps. It supports both lossy and lossless compression. It supports both PNG style transparency and GIF style animations without needing extra files or format conversions. It has >95% support across all browsers globally.

While building Wordcorn, I have been able to save up to 80% or more in cloud hosting space by just converting our images into webp format. This also allowed me to cut down the image fetch latency significantly. We also improved our LCP web vitals metric across various pages.

🔊 Recently I decided to build our own tool for compressing images - www.tinypic.fyi

There were two primary motivations behind building tinypic

1. Security - I wanted an ability to compress images without having to upload them to servers
2. Speed - I wanted to reduce image compression times for bulk compressions

Tinypic works completely locally and out of your browser. It uses the HTML canvas API & browsers native webP encoding ability to compress images without compromising the quality.

Tinypic is opinionated. It purposely doesn't support finer controls over quality, image sizes and dimensions.

As AVIF starts having broader support, I plan to extend support for compressing images and converting them into AVIF format.