I Built 550 Image Tools. Here's What People Actually Use

When I started building imagemochi, I had a spreadsheet with 21 "core" image operations: resize, compress, convert, crop, rotate, and so on. Then I started thinking about variations. Resize to specific dimensions? That's a tool. Compress to a specific file size? Another tool. Convert from this format to that format? That's a tool for every format pair.

The spreadsheet grew. By the time I was done, I'd built 550+ tool pages. Every specific variation of every image operation I could think of.

A year later, looking at the analytics data, most of my assumptions about what people would use were wrong.

The Top 10 (By Actual Usage)

Here's what people actually use, ranked by monthly page views:

1. HEIC to JPG converter — This blew me away. It gets more traffic than everything else combined on some days. iPhone users trying to upload photos to forms that don't accept HEIC.
2. Image compressor — The "compress to under 100KB" variant specifically. Government forms and job applications drive this.
3. Image resizer — Mostly to specific pixel dimensions like 600x600 or 1200x1200.
4. PDF to image — Students and office workers extracting pages from PDFs.
5. JPG to PNG converter — People needing transparency support.
6. Background remover (via enhance) — Product photos for e-commerce.
7. Passport photo resizer — Specific country requirements (2x2 inches, 35x45mm, etc.)
8. DPI changer — Almost entirely driven by print shop requirements and government forms.
9. Image to PDF — Combining scanned documents.
10. WebP to JPG — People saving WebP images from websites and needing to use them elsewhere.

What Surprised Me

I built elaborate tools for things like watermarking, color adjustment, and sharpen with customizable parameters. Almost nobody uses them. Or rather, the people who need those features are already using Photoshop or Lightroom.

The tools that get used are dead simple. Drop a file, get a result. No sliders, no options, no decisions. HEIC to JPG: drop, click, done. That's what people want.

Another surprise: the most-visited pages aren't always the core tools. Specific variant pages like "compress image to 50KB" or "resize image to 2x2 inches" get huge traffic from people Googling those exact phrases. Long-tail SEO turned out to be way more important than I expected.

What Nobody Cares About

I'm not going to pretend every tool was a hit.

My color profile converter? Basically zero traffic. Turns out, the overlap between "people who understand color profiles" and "people who need a free online tool" is approximately nobody.

The SVG to PNG converter at custom sizes? I thought designers would love it. They don't need it — their design tools handle this natively.

Image filters (sepia, grayscale, etc.)? Instagram killed that market a decade ago. Nobody is using a separate tool for filters.

The Privacy Angle

Something I didn't anticipate: a significant portion of users specifically seek out imagemochi because it processes everything in the browser. No uploads. I get emails about this regularly. People processing passport scans, medical documents, personal photos — they don't want those files on some random server in Virginia.

When I was building the compression engine, I had a choice: server-side processing (faster, more powerful) or client-side JavaScript (slower but completely private). I chose client-side, mostly because server infrastructure is expensive for a solo project. But it turned out to be one of the best decisions I made — it became a genuine selling point.

What I'd Build Differently

If I were starting over, I'd focus on fewer tools and make each one better. The 550-page approach is great for SEO, but maintaining all of them is a nightmare. When I update the UI, I have to regenerate 550 HTML files. When I fix a bug in the compression engine, I need to make sure it works across every page that uses it.

I'd also invest more in batch processing earlier. Most people don't need to process one image — they need to process twenty. The batch feature was an afterthought, and it's now one of the most-requested features.