iLoveIMG Alternative for Mac: Compress Photos Without Uploading Them

Three cases where iLoveIMG is the better choice and a $29 purchase would be wasted.

You compress a few images a month. The free plan covers it, there is nothing to install, and you can start a job in seconds. Smol has no trial, so that low commitment matters.

You need the editor tools. Crop, rotate, watermark, meme maker, background removal and face blur are all on the iLoveIMG homepage. Smol compresses, converts, strips metadata and upscales. It does not edit.

You are not at your own Mac. A browser tool works on a borrowed laptop, a Windows PC or a Chromebook. Smol is macOS only, and a license covers one Mac.

Yes. It is a web service, so each image is sent to its servers, processed there and sent back.

The site shows an ISO27001 badge and an HTTPS badge on its homepage, which tells you about transport and certification. The pages we read did not state how long uploaded files are kept, so we will not guess. If that matters, read its privacy policy yourself before sending anything sensitive.

Smol takes the other route. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and no server, so the question never arises. That is the strongest reason to switch for anyone working with client photos, ID scans, medical images or unreleased product shots. It also helps on a slow connection: a folder of 40 MB camera files does not have to travel anywhere. If location data is your concern, see stripping GPS from photos and what to check before you post a photo.

For occasional use, probably. For daily use, check the limits first.

The pricing page lists Premium at $4 a month billed annually ($48 a year), or $7 billed monthly. It raises the file size limit for most tools from 200 MB to 4 GB, lifts the task figure for compress, resize and convert from 30 to 120, removes ads and adds priority support and 2,000 AI credits. Upscale stays at 6 MB per file and background removal at 6 MB on both plans.

Smol’s Solo license is $29, which is less than one year of annual Premium, for one Mac, with free updates. Teams pay $49 for three Macs. There is no subscription and no quota. The trade is that you cannot test it first and sales are final, so check that your formats are on our list before buying. Pricing details are on the buy page.

It does not work offline, and its compressor is narrower than its toolbox suggests.

The compress page lists JPG, PNG, SVG and GIF. HEIC and camera RAW are accepted by its Convert to JPG tool, which means an iPhone photo goes through two steps. Its upscaler offers 2x and 4x for images under 6 MP. This site covers images only, and no desktop app is mentioned, so there is no Finder Quick Action or watched folder.

Smol reads HEIC directly, writes AVIF and HEIC, accepts camera RAW as input, and also compresses PDFs, video and audio. In our own test on 24 small photographs, Smol’s AVIF needed 22 to 26% fewer bytes than the best JPEG at the same SSIMULACRA2 score, and at default settings it made high-quality JPEG photos 69.3% smaller (see the benchmark). Those are 768 by 512 images and not a prediction for your camera files. We did not run iLoveIMG in that test. For the wider field, see the best image compressor for Mac.

Drag the same files into Smol and pick the output you used before. It takes about a minute to set up.

Drop a folder, choose JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF, set a quality (default 75) and run. Smol writes a copy beside each original with a _compressed suffix by default, so nothing is overwritten. One thing to know first: images are resized to fit inside 2000 by 2000 px unless you change it, so photographers should raise or switch that off. For iPhone photos, use Compress with output JPG rather than Convert, because Convert writes a large, high-quality JPEG. The walkthrough is in batch converting HEIC to JPG.

If you came from the PDF side of the same company, iLovePDF alternatives covers that product, and Smol vs TinyPNG compares another online compressor. For other upload-based tools, see CloudConvert alternatives.