Launching TrimrPix for iOS, compress photos in place with no duplicate album
Hey IH 👋
I'm Jarl, a solo maker. I just shipped TrimrPix for iOS, a small app that compresses photos right inside your iPhone's Photos library.
Here's the itch. Phones fill up, iCloud keeps nagging you to buy more storage, and the usual fix is deleting photos you actually wanted to keep. Every compressor I tried had the same problem: it saves a smaller copy and leaves the original sitting there, so now you've got a messy "Compressed" album to clean up by hand. That kind of defeats the point.
So TrimrPix does the thing those apps won't. It replaces the original in place. No duplicates, no cloud, no accounts, and everything runs on the device.
The funny part is that "just replace it in place" turned out to be basically the whole project. iOS's Photos framework flat out rejects in-place edits on modern HEIC photos (the ones with HDR gain maps or spatial data) and hands you a cryptic error. I lost a good chunk of time on that before settling on a hybrid: edit in place where iOS allows it, and for the stubborn ones, quietly recreate the photo and delete the original, batched so you only get asked to confirm once. The lesson I keep relearning is that the "simple" feature is where all the work hides.
Honest status: it's live, it's early, and the numbers are small. One-time $1.99, no subscription, no ads, no tracking. It's the iOS sibling to my Mac app (TrimrPix), which I built first. The number one request over there was always "can I get this on my phone?", so here we are.
Two things I'd genuinely love your take on:
Does "no duplicates, replaces the original" actually land as a reason to pay, or is it too subtle?
For a small utility like this, would you go one-time price or a cheap subscription?
I'll keep posting as I learn. Thanks for reading 🙏
One thing that stood out to me is how often utility products end up creating value in places users never directly observe.
Most people won't know about the Photos framework limitations.
They'll only experience the absence of a duplicate album.
The interesting part is that those two things can end up feeling wildly disproportionate to the person building them.
A huge amount of effort gets invested so the user never has to notice a problem existed in the first place.
Really well put, and that gap is exactly what makes utilities humbling to build. The entire point of TrimrPix is that nothing happens that the user notices. No duplicate album, no cleanup, no "wait, where did my original go." The win is an absence.
The HEIC thing is the perfect example. I spent days on a fallback path for the photos iOS refuses to edit in place (the ones with HDR gain maps or spatial data). When it works, the user feels nothing at all. They just get a smaller photo where the old one used to be. The only version of that feature anyone would ever notice is the broken one.
I've sort of made peace with it: for a utility, "invisible" is the goal state. The annoying flip side is that it makes marketing hard, because the value is literally the thing people don't see.
How do you usually surface invisible value without overselling it? That's the part I keep wrestling with.