Images are still the single heaviest asset on most web pages, and one unoptimized hero shot can wreck your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) before a line of your JavaScript even runs. The catch is that manual optimization — dragging files through a desktop tool before every deploy — simply does not scale. The moment your users start uploading their own avatars, products, or listings, compression has to happen automatically, on the server, in real time . That is exactly what an image optimization A