Privacy

Your images

Every conversion happens locally, using the image encoder built into macOS. Your files are read from where they are, written next to them (or to the folder you chose), and that is the end of it. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is copied anywhere, and no part of an image — not the picture, not its name, not its size — is transmitted off your Mac.

There is no account to create, nothing to sign in to, and no server belonging to this app for anything to be sent to.

The one connection the app makes

The app can check whether a newer version exists. That check asks GitHub for a small file listing the current release, and, if you accept an update, downloads it. It is the only network request the app makes, and it has nothing to do with your images.

• The app asks your permission on the second launch, and you can say no. You can change that answer later in the dialog it shows.
• No identifier, licence key, system profile or usage data is sent with the check. Sparkle's optional system profiling is switched off.
• GitHub, like any web server, records the request in its own logs — your IP address, the time, and which file was asked for. That log belongs to GitHub and is covered by their privacy statement. Nothing from it is sent on to anyone else.
• Installed through Homebrew? Then updates come from brew, and the app's own check is the same one described here.

What stays on your Mac

• Your settings — the size limit, the destination, the shortcut and the rest, in the app's own preferences file.
• A short log at ~/Library/Logs/ImageShrink.log, containing file names and what happened to them. It exists because a Finder action that silently does nothing is otherwise impossible to diagnose, and it is truncated once it grows past a few hundred kilobytes.
• Recent batches — counts and sizes only, shown in the menu bar panel.

All three are ordinary files in your home folder. Deleting the app's preferences, the log, or running ./scripts/uninstall.sh from the source removes them.

Metadata in your photos

This is the part worth reading twice. By default a converted photo keeps the metadata the original carried — including the date, the camera, and the GPS coordinates where it was taken. That is usually what you want when the file stays with you, and rarely what you want when you are about to upload it somewhere.

Switching on Remove metadata in Settings drops EXIF and GPS from everything the app writes. Orientation is kept regardless, because without it the picture displays rotated.

This website

These pages are static files on GitHub Pages. There are no analytics, no cookies, no trackers and no embedded third-party scripts — view the source, it is a few kilobytes of HTML. GitHub serves them and keeps its own server logs, as above.

If this ever changes

Any change to what the app sends or stores would be a change to its source, which is public, and would appear in the changelog with the release that made it. The commitment behind this page is in the repository's own rules: no analytics, no crash reporting, no "anonymous usage statistics".

Questions, or something on this page that does not match what you observe: open an issue.