Privacy, Polish, and the Art of Building Something Actually Useful
There’s a particular kind of frustration that builds up slowly when you’re dealing with the modern web. You need to do something simple — resize a photo, strip some metadata, blur a face — and suddenly you’re being asked to sign up for a free trial, verify your email, and “unlock premium features” just to do what should take thirty seconds. It’s exhausting. And it’s gotten worse, not better.
So when I stumbled across a project this week — essentially Stirling-PDF but built for images — I found myself genuinely interested. The pitch is clean: one Docker container, browser-based, everything runs locally, your files never leave your machine. Thirty-plus tools covering the usual suspects like resize, crop, rotate, compress, and convert, but also some more interesting stuff like background removal, face and licence plate blurring, OCR, and object erasing. The developer is building it openly, asking for feedback, and has explicitly said they’re not interested in making it another “AI-wrapped gimmick or subscription trap.”
That last bit hit a nerve in the best possible way.
The backstory is genuinely charming too. The developer needed to resize passport photos and didn’t want to upload them to some random website — which, honestly, fair enough. Passport photos contain real biometric data and handing them to a free web tool run by who-knows-who is a dodgy proposition. They went looking for a self-hosted image tool with the same kind of polish that Stirling-PDF brought to PDFs, found nothing that quite fit the bill, and just… built it themselves. While working full time. That’s the kind of quiet, determined open-source energy that actually moves things forward.
The privacy angle resonates with me deeply. We’ve become so normalised to uploading our personal files — photos of our kids, documents with our addresses, images with embedded GPS metadata — to cloud services without a second thought. It’s a habit that’s been baked into us by years of “free” tools that are, of course, free because we are the product. Running something locally, in your own Docker environment, where nothing phones home? That should be the default, not the exception.
The project isn’t without its rough edges. The Docker image is sitting at over 9GB right now, which is a legitimate gripe. Most of that bulk comes from the Python ML models powering the AI features. The developer seems aware of it and is planning a lighter version once they get a clearer picture of which tools people actually use. That’s sensible prioritisation, honestly — ship something complete, learn what matters, then optimise. It’s what I’d do.
There’s a naming controversy swirling around it too. Using “Stirling” in the name is, at minimum, a risk. Stirling-PDF has grown into a real business, not just a hobby project, and there’s a reasonable argument that the naming creates confusion about whether the two are affiliated. Several people in the discussion have flagged this, some quite strongly, suggesting the developer could face a cease and desist down the track. One commenter even floated the idea of leaning into other Scottish city names — Dundee or Perth were suggested, though someone quickly pointed out both carry Australian connotations too. Dundee needs no explanation. And Perth, well, we’ve got a rather large one of our own over on the west coast.
The developer seems genuine about it being an homage rather than an attempt to ride on someone else’s brand, and I believe them. But good intentions don’t always protect you legally, and it would be a shame to see a useful project derailed by a naming dispute before it even finds its feet.
What I keep coming back to though is the bigger picture this project represents. The self-hosted, privacy-respecting software movement has been quietly growing for years. Tools like Stirling-PDF, Home Assistant, Immich, Jellyfin — they’re building an alternative ecosystem to the subscription-everything, cloud-first world that Big Tech wants us to live in. Every time someone builds something genuinely useful and gives it away, they’re pushing back against that model. And right now, with AI features being bolted onto everything as justification for another price hike, that pushback feels more necessary than ever.
If you’ve got a home server or even just a machine where you can run Docker, it’s worth keeping an eye on this one. The fundamentals are solid, the intent is right, and the developer is clearly listening. Give it a star on GitHub, try it out, file an issue or two. That’s how these things grow into something great.