I got tired of uploading my photos to random websites just to convert them, so I built a native Mac app that doesn’t
The story of Senqu Image Converter — and why I think privacy belongs in boring tools too
A few weeks ago I needed to convert about thirty HEIC photos to JPEG. Nothing dramatic — just everyday stuff. I opened my browser, hit one of those convert-online sites, and stopped before uploading.
These were personal photos. I didn’t know who ran the site. I didn’t know what they did with the files after the “conversion.” I closed the tab.
So I tried the desktop alternatives. Either bloated image editors where conversion is buried under five menus, or sketchy utilities that hadn’t been updated in years. None of them felt like what I actually wanted, which was something small, native, fast, and private — a tool that converts my images on my own Mac without phoning home or pretending to be a photo editor.
That night I started building Senqu.
The thing the existing options miss
There’s no shortage of image converters. Web tools like TinyPNG, CloudConvert, Squoosh. Desktop editors like Photoshop, Affinity, Pixelmator. They all “convert images.” But they fail in two specific, opposite ways.
The web tools require you to upload your photos to a server. For a meme, fine. For your actual personal photos — receipts, screenshots of private messages, photos of your kids, anything sensitive — you’re handing your files to someone else’s infrastructure for a five-second job. Even if the site swears it deletes everything, you’re trusting strangers with your stuff to save thirty seconds.
The desktop editors are overkill. I don’t need layers, filters, a tone curve, and a $20/month subscription to change a file format. I need to drag in an image, pick “JPEG,” and have it done.
There was an obvious gap in the middle: a focused native Mac utility that does only image conversion, doesn’t upload anything, doesn’t try to grow into a full editor, and respects your file the way a real tool should.
Senqu is that utility.
What it does
The pitch is simple enough to fit in a sentence: drag images or a folder in, pick a format, and convert — everything happens on your Mac.
Under the hood it does five things well:
Convert between JPEG, PNG, HEIC, and TIFF, or combine images into a PDF. Batch a whole folder; it handles hundreds of files without breaking a sweat.
Compress with a quality slider, or set a target file size and let Senqu find the highest quality that fits under it. The size-savings readout shows you exactly how much space you saved.
Resize to a maximum dimension when you need smaller outputs.
Strip EXIF and GPS metadata so you don’t accidentally share where or how a photo was taken.
It also lives in your menu bar — a small dropdown panel for quick jobs — with a full window when you have a big batch.
Built on what’s already there
The most important engineering decision I made was the boring one: use what Apple already ships. Senqu is built on ImageIO, PDFKit, SwiftUI, and AppKit. No third-party dependencies. No bundled libraries phoning home. No subscriptions to keep the lights on. The whole app is a few megabytes, runs on macOS 14 and later, and works completely offline.
This isn’t just an aesthetic choice — it’s how I get to credibly say “private.” When your app has no network code and no third-party SDKs, you’re not asking users to trust your promises; you’re shipping software that can’t leak their data even if I wanted it to. The privacy is structural, not policy.
The thing I almost didn’t catch
A few hours before submitting to the App Store, I was doing a final test pass. I clicked WebP as the output format. The UI said: “Not supported on this system.”
Turns out macOS can read WebP files but doesn’t expose WebP as a writable output format through ImageIO — even on macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. My app had a runtime gate doing exactly the right thing (failing safely), but my App Store listing prominently advertised WebP as a supported format.
I almost shipped a listing that promised a feature my app couldn’t deliver.
I pulled WebP from the format picker, scrubbed it from the keywords, the description, the marketing copy, the support FAQ — everywhere. Re-archived, re-uploaded, re-submitted. The app and the listing now match.
I share this because I think it matters more than the technical detail: a tool that respects your privacy should respect your time and trust too. Advertising features that don’t work is a quiet form of disrespect. Catching that in testing, even though it meant another build cycle on a Sunday night, was non-negotiable. The whole pitch of Senqu is that it’s honest software. The listing has to be too.
Where I’m from, and why the name
I’m in Maseru, Lesotho. The Senqu — known downstream in South Africa as the Orange — is the river that rises in our highlands and flows across half the continent. It felt right to put a piece of where I’m from into something I’m making for the world.
The icon is a stylized river through mountains. If you ever wondered what the highlands look like, that’s the gesture.
Where it is now
Senqu Image Converter is available on the Mac App Store: DOWNLOAD HERE.
It’s $5.99, one-time purchase, no subscription, no tracking, no upsells. macOS 14 or later. If you ever wanted a small, focused, private image converter for your Mac — and you didn’t know exactly that’s what you wanted until you read this paragraph — I made it for you.
If you have questions, bug reports, or feature requests, the support page is here: https://badaboop.com/2026/05/25/senqu-image-converter-support/, and the privacy policy (short, because there’s nothing to disclose) is here: https://badaboop.com/2026/05/25/senqu-converter-privacy-policy/.
Made in Maseru. Built honestly. Yours.
