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November 4, 2026 4 min read

Shrinking Apps with Shrink Wizard

Shrink Wizard frees up disk space on your Mac. It leverages macOS’s built-in APFS compression to deliver savings of 50-60% on apps, and lossless JPEG recompression to save up to 20% on photos.

Smaller Apps & Binaries

Shrink Wizard excels at compressing applications, regularly returning savings of at least 50% on binaries, build files, and text-like content. On maximum settings, Shrink Wizard saved 59.4% across a sample of 8 popular apps:

App sizes before and after Shrink Wizard Eight popular apps shrink by 59.4% overall. Gray spans the original size; blue shows the compressed size. All values are MB on disk. Original size After Shrink Wizard Google Chrome 1,510 → 689 MB Microsoft Edge 1,013 → 430 MB Visual Studio Code 951 → 313 MB Slack 595 → 234 MB Firefox 535 → 195 MB Discord 511 → 206 MB Zoom 472 → 200 MB Spotify 423 → 173 MB 0 500 1,000 1,500
Figure 1. Size on disk at the Maximum setting. Gray spans the original size; blue shows the compressed size. Values are in MB.

Shrink Wizard uses transparent APFS compression, so apps remain fully functional, and are decompressed automatically when used. Shrink Wizard can even compress itself - although at 19.5 MB, there’s not much to save!

Smaller Photos

Shrink Wizard also uses lossless JPEG recompression to save space. This results in smaller photos with identical image content and metadata.

JPEGs can be reduced by ~8% without quality loss while remaining in the JPEG format. Larger savings of ~20% can be obtained by converting to JXL. Conversions to JXL are byte-reversible to the original JPEG at any time.

100 iPhone photos, stored three ways JPEG inputs total 284.39 MB. Optimized JPEGs total 259.76 MB, saving 8.7%. JPEG XL totals 230.61 MB, saving 18.9%. Both options start from the same JPEG inputs. Original size After Shrink Wizard Original JPEGs 284.39 MB Optimized JPEGs 259.76 MB · −8.7% JPEG XL 230.61 MB · −18.9%
Figure 2. Savings on a random sample of 100 JPEG photos, obtained from my device.

Shrink Wizard uses standard JPEG compression by default, but JXL is recommended for users that are comfortable with a (reversible) format change.

Other Files

Shrink Wizard is not limited just to apps and photos - many other types of files can be compressed, although savings vary substantially by contents:

File typeSpace saved
Text & source code51.9%
Apps & executables59.4%
PDFs30.4%
Spreadsheets (XLSX)29.7%
Uncompressed TIFF images15.4%
PNG images2.2%

Use it for Free

Download Shrink Wizard and run a scan to see what you can recover. You’ll have a chance to review compression settings before the app makes any changes.

Shrink Wizard is free with no usage limits. I have not published source code at this time, however there is a GitHub Repository for opening issues / feature requests. I plan to release the underlying compressors shortly, the GUI code will not be published unless there is substantial demand.

Windows Support

Shrink Wizard also supports Windows. On Windows, wof.sys controls the compression process, Shrink Wizard uses standard Windows compression options.