I shipped a free image toolkit that never uploads your photo for processing
Hey Indie Hackers — I’m Samson from India (Acsaven).
Problem: almost every “free converter” wants the file first. Fine for a meme; less fine for a passport or exam portal photo.
What I built: TryQuickImg — HEIC→JPG, compress-to-KB, resize, crop, QR, light PDF — all in the browser. Exact KB targets matter a lot for form portals.
Stage: live, free forever for core tools. No waitlist.
What I want feedback on:
1) Is “no upload for processing” the right headline, or do people just care about “hit 100 KB”?
2) Which portal preset should I ship next?
I like that you're framing privacy as part of the workflow rather than an extra feature.
For quick utilities, people often care less about what the tool can do than whether they can use it without having to think twice about what happens to their files.
Privacy-first is a strong differentiator. Are users choosing this mainly for that, or for speed/convenience?
No survey data on this yet, so I can't give you a real percentage — but architecturally it's the same decision either way. Everything (HEIC decode, compress, resize, crop) runs in Web Workers via OffscreenCanvas, so there's no upload/download round-trip at all — that's simultaneously why it's private (bytes never leave your browser) and why it's fast (no network wait, and it keeps working even if your connection drops mid-session). The exact-KB compression is a binary search on JPEG quality running locally too, so you get instant retries instead of re-uploading each attempt. So less "which one do people pick" and more "one architecture choice gave us both for free."
That’s a really clean architectural win — getting speed + privacy from the same decision is rare.
From a user perspective though, people usually discover one benefit first (either speed or privacy), and the other becomes a bonus.
Do you have a sense yet which one is actually pulling people in?
No hard data yet, but my guess: the KB target is what gets people in the door — "needs to be exactly 100KB" is a more specific, searchable pain than "I want privacy." No-upload probably matters more for trust once they're already on the page. Same open question I put in the post itself.
Quick add: “no upload for processing” means the HEIC/compress/resize/crop/QR work runs in your tab after the page loads — we don’t take the file bytes onto our servers for those jobs.
If you’ve got a portal that rejects photos over a weird KB limit (or only accepts JPG from iPhone HEIC), tell me the limit + country/form and I’ll prioritize that preset.
That’s a sharp read — “exact KB” is a much stronger entry point than privacy.
If that’s true, there’s probably a play in doubling down on those constraint-based use cases (forms, uploads, job apps, etc.) rather than general tooling.
Would be interesting to see what keywords are already bringing people in there.