The Making of Tealpod Image Compressor & RAW Converter

Tealpod Image Compressor and RAW Converter is the first product I’ve made after becoming an IndieHacker. Having extensively worked in Graphics and Image processing, I decided to make desktop and web applications related to photography and image tools. Here is a little information about the highlights and tech specs behind Tealpod Image Compressor.

Technology : JavaFX on MacOS, C# .NET on Windows with ImageMagick

Time Taken: 3 Months

Payment Method: Paddle.com

Initially Tealpod Image Compressor was a trialware with 15 days of trial, now I changed it to pay-what-you-want model. Paddle provides a nice SDK for supporting trial period, in-app-purchase and restricting features based on purchase status. Just to let you know there are also analytics and log features available on PaddleSDK for MacOS but not for Windows (Why paddle?).

Tealpod Compressor & Converter Features Video

Features: Compresses Image quality and offers Live Preview for each image while adjusting quality. You can view the comparison between ‘Before Compression’ (Original) image and ‘After Compression’ image. Converts RAW formats like Canon, Nikon, TIFF, CR2, CRW, NEF, EFR, BMP and PSD files into JPG or PNG.

Image Compare while changing Quality

I tested various Image processing libraries and selected the best quality and performance for converting RAW formats. MacOS has a powerful native image processing library (Quartz). MacOS Quartz provides superior quality and performance compared to the external libraries. The only issue is fetching the image information like dimension is painfully slow. For fetching image information “mdls” is much faster than Quartz.

On Windows I used ImageMagick library for supporting different image formats and PSD files. So I used different libraries based on which one best suits for the job.