I Processed 3.51 GB of DSLR Photos Entirely Inside Chrome, Across Three Very Different Laptops
275 photographs. 3.51 GB of data. Three machines. Zero image uploads.
Browsers have come a long way. But can Chrome handle hundreds of high-resolution DSLR photographs without relying on a server?
I wanted to find out.
While building the Batch Image Processor for iLoveTools, I tested it with 275 real DSLR photographs, approximately 12 MB each.
The machines ranged from a 2nd Gen Intel Core i3 laptop with 8 GB RAM to a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max and 36 GB RAM.
The results
It included six operations: resizing, watermarking, metadata cleaning, WebP conversion, compression, and file renaming.
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The entire workflow ran inside Chrome without uploading photographs to a server.
But the result that interested me most wasn’t the fastest machine.
It was the oldest one.
A 2nd Gen Core i3 with 8 GB RAM managed to process all 275 photographs without becoming unusable.
What impressed me most wasn’t the M3 Max finishing in 68 seconds. It was that a 2nd Gen Core i3 with just 8 GB RAM completed the batch without becoming unusable. And another thing this experiment reminded me that modern browsers are insanely powerful. You can do a lot more than just browse websites.
We’re at a point where some tasks that traditionally required desktop software can now run entirely inside the browser, without uploading files to a server.
That’s the direction I’m exploring with iLoveTools. I built this as part of iLoveTools, a collection of free browser-based utilities. You can try it at https://ilovetools.lol/images/batch
What do you think? Would you use a browser-based tool for processing hundreds of photographs?
