I Built a Free Browser-Based Image Tool as a Side Project

I Built a Free Browser-Based Image Tool as a Side Project — Here's What I Learned I've been working a side project for the past few weeks after work. It's called ToolPad — a collection of free image tools that run entirely in your browser. Background removal, image compression, resizing, cropping, and format conversion. Nothing fancy, but I wanted to build something real and actually ship it. Why I Built It I kept running into the same frustration. Whenever I needed to quickly compress an image or remove a background I'd end up on some site that either: Uploaded my files to their servers Slapped a watermark on the output Asked me to sign up before doing anything Felt slow and cluttered I figured the browser is powerful enough to handle most of these operations locally. So I decided to build something that just works, with no friction. The Tech Stack Next.js 14 with App Router Tailwind CSS for styling Canvas API for resize, crop, and conversion browser-image-compression library for comp