Introducing Shrinklab: a free image compressor that never sees your photos
If you’ve ever tried to speed up a slow website, you already know the biggest culprit is almost always the same thing: images. A single unoptimised photo straight off a phone or camera can weigh 5–10 MB — and every one of those megabytes is time a visitor spends staring at a half-loaded page.
We built Shrinklab to fix that, and we’re making it free for anyone to use.
Read more about image optimisation for the web and WEBP images.
What it does
Shrinklab is a browser-based image compressor. Drop in up to 20 photos — JPG, PNG, WebP, or AVIF — and it shrinks them down, often by 60–90%, with barely any visible difference in quality. You can convert between formats too, so if you’ve been meaning to move your site over to WebP or the newer, even smaller AVIF format, this is the easiest way to do it.
Once it’s done, you’ll see exactly how much space you saved on each image, and you can download them one at a time or as a single zip file.
The part we’re proudest of: your photos never leave your device
Most online image tools work by uploading your files to a server, compressing them there, and sending them back. Shrinklab doesn’t do that. All of the compression happens right inside your own browser, using the same open-source technology behind Google’s own image tools.
That means:
- Nothing is uploaded. Your photos stay on your computer the entire time.
- Nothing is stored. There’s no server-side copy sitting somewhere after you’re done.
- It’s fast, because there’s no upload-then-download round trip — just your device doing the work directly.
Why we built it
A fast website is one of the simplest, most overlooked ways to keep visitors from bouncing before they even see what you offer. We work with businesses on this all the time, and “just compress your images” is advice we give constantly — so we decided to make the tool we kept wishing existed: something quick, free, and trustworthy enough to recommend without hesitation.
Try it
Head to shrinklab.swandesign.co.za and drop in a few images — no sign-up, no catch. If you’re getting your own website in shape and want a second pair of eyes on more than just image sizes, get in touch — that’s the kind of thing we do all day.
