Manual

Quick start

1. Drop images or folders into the center column.
2. Choose a preset in the left sidebar (Web, Email, Web + JPEG, Lossless, Document Scan, Remove Background, and more).
3. Optionally highlight specific rows (⌘-click for multiple). With nothing highlighted, Compress runs the whole queue.
4. Press the blue Compress button (⌘↩).
5. Review results in the Compare panel; outputs land next to originals or in your chosen output folder.

Sidebar tabs

Presets

One-click recipes for format, quality, and resize. Selecting a preset updates the Tweak tab; you can override anything before compressing.

Tweak

Output format, quality (lossy formats), resize mode (original, longest side, scale %), and upscale factor.

Effects

• Strip all metadata — removes EXIF, IPTC, XMP, GPS from supported outputs.
• Strip GPS only — keeps camera info, removes location.
• Also remove background on Compress — stacks AI background removal onto a normal compress pass (or use the Remove Background preset for one-click cutouts).
• Replace originals — overwrites source files in place. Leave off unless you mean it. By default PhotoShrinkr writes new optimized files and does not touch your originals. Only enable Replace originals in Settings if you explicitly want in-place overwrite.
• Force smaller than original — retries at lower quality if the first pass isn't smaller than the source.

Toolbar extras

• Zip Outputs — bundles finished files into a .zip (name configurable in Settings).
• Combine to PDF, Crop, Smart Crop — batch utilities on the selection or full queue.
• Double-click a row to reveal it in Finder. Press Space for Quick Look.

Status column — what the colors mean

• Queued (gray clock) — waiting to run.
• Compressing… (spinner) — in progress.
• Done (green check) — finished successfully.
• Red warning — compression failed for that file (unsupported input, permission error, disk full, etc.). The original is untouched; read the short error in the Status column.

If the optimized file would be larger than the original, PhotoShrinkr keeps the smaller result and may copy the original bytes to the output slot — your source file on disk is still not modified unless Replace originals is on.

Compare panel

Swipe, Side-by-Side, and Stacked modes compare original vs compressed. The centered Before → After sizes at the bottom refer to the row selected in the list — left preview is before, right preview is after.

Hide the Compare panel with the inspector button at the bottom-right of the center column (⌘⇧I) to give the file list more room. This closes the right panel only; presets stay visible on the left.

Output folder

Use Choose Output Folder in the toolbar or PhotoShrinkr → Settings → General. Default behavior writes optimized files beside each original as name-shrunk.ext.

Shrinkr Wand (Finder Quick Action)

Right-click images in Finder → Quick Actions → PhotoShrinkr. Uses your current sidebar settings. Configure sound and reveal options in Settings.

Trial & license

Unregistered users get 5 free compressions per day without a watermark. From the 6th output onward, a small Created with PhotoShrinkr stamp is added. Activate from the trial banner or Settings → License to remove limits and watermarks.