Should you switch? The short answer
Switch if you compress or convert images regularly and do not want a counter watching you, if you work with photos that should not be uploaded — client work, ID documents, screenshots with customer data — or if you mostly need the core four: compress, resize, crop, convert.
Stay with iLoveIMG if you need AI upscaling, watermarking or its photo editor. ImgSquash does not have those. It does now remove backgrounds, and does it without uploading anything — but the model runs on your device, so it is slower than their server and softer on fine detail like hair.
Disclosure: ImgSquash is our tool. Every iLoveIMG figure below comes from their published pricing page, linked at the bottom.
The free-tier limits you are hitting
iLoveIMG's free allowances are per tool, and they fall off a cliff outside the basics. Compress, Resize, Convert, Rotate and Watermark get 200 MB and 30 tasks. Crop gets 90 MB and 1 task. The Image Editor gets 50 MB and 1 task. Upscale and Remove Background get 6 MB and 3 tasks.
That 6 MB ceiling is the one that bites hardest, because it lands on exactly the tools you would use a modern phone photo with — and a modern phone photo is frequently larger than 6 MB before you start.
Lifting the caps is Premium at $7 a month or $48 billed annually. The free tier is also ad-supported and web-only; mobile access sits behind the paid plan.
ImgSquash has no task counter, because there is no task to count — the work happens on your own device. The honest limit on our side is your device's memory: a batch of several hundred photos is fine on a laptop and will struggle on an old phone.
Where your images go
iLoveIMG processes on its servers, which means your images are uploaded. That is not a criticism — a server can run a far larger model than a browser tab can, which is why their upscaler exists and ours does not, and why their background removal handles hair better than ours.
ImgSquash uses the browser's Canvas API and never sends the file anywhere. This is checkable rather than promised: open your browser's network tab while you compress a batch and you will see no upload, and the tools keep working if you disconnect after the page has loaded.
This is worth being sceptical about generally, because "processed in your browser" is now a claim on almost every image tool's homepage, including competitors that then upload anyway. The network tab settles it in about five seconds, for us or for anyone else.
Where iLoveIMG is genuinely better
Feature range. iLoveIMG ships thirteen tools; we ship five plus twenty-nine format-conversion pages. Their upscaler, watermarking tool, meme generator and photo editor have no equivalent here.
Background-removal quality. We both do it; theirs is better. A server can run a model many times larger than one a browser will download, and it shows on hair, fur and semi-transparent edges. Ours is computed at 320×320 and scaled up, which is fine at web sizes and visibly soft at full zoom. The trade you get for that is that the photo never leaves your device.
Very large files on weak hardware. Server-side processing does not care how much memory your device has. If you are compressing a 400 MB TIFF on a Chromebook, their architecture is the right one.
Mobile apps, on the paid plan. We are a website only.
How to switch
Nothing to migrate — no account, no library, no export. Bookmark whichever tool you use most.
Most people arrive here for compression or a specific format conversion; both are linked below, along with the HEIC converter, which is the single most-requested one because iPhones keep producing files that other software refuses to open.