flutter_image_compress_lite

Standalone image-compression plugin for Flutter on Android and iOS — a replacement for flutter_image_compress, collapsed into a single package (no federated architecture, hence no macOS/Web/OpenHarmony).

Purpose: minimal and legacy-free, for current toolchains only — minimal native dependencies, no CocoaPods, and built against the latest AGP, Gradle, Flutter, and Xcode rather than older ones. If you need older toolchains or CocoaPods, use the upstream package instead.

What changed vs upstream

	flutter_image_compress	flutter_image_compress_lite
Architecture	federated (3 packages)	standalone (1 package)
Platforms	Android, iOS, macOS, Web, OpenHarmony	Android, iOS
Dart / Flutter	>=2.12 / >=2.0	^3.11 / >=3.41
Image formats
JPEG / PNG	yes	yes
HEIC / HEIF (iOS)	yes	yes
HEIC / HEIF (Android)	yes (heifwriter, API 28+)	yes (heifwriter, API 28+)
WebP (iOS)	encode + decode (SDWebImage)	decode only (native)
WebP (Android)	yes (native)	yes (native)
Android
Native deps	exifinterface, heifwriter, commons-io	heifwriter only
keepExif	androidx.exifinterface	native android.media.ExifInterface
Language	Java + Kotlin	Kotlin
minSdk	21	24
AGP	8+ (Groovy)	9+ only (Kotlin DSL)
iOS
Native deps	SDWebImage, SDWebImageWebPCoder, Mantle	none
keepExif	Mantle / SYMetadata	native ImageIO
Language	Objective-C	Swift 6
Packaging	CocoaPods	SPM only
Deployment target	9.0	15.0
Xcode (to build)	any (no Swift floor)	26+ (Swift 6.2 toolchain)

Usage

dependencies:
  flutter_image_compress_lite: ^2.5.0

import 'package:flutter_image_compress_lite/flutter_image_compress_lite.dart';

final result = await FlutterImageCompress.compressAndGetFile(
  sourcePath,
  targetPath,
);

See example/main.dart for the bytes-in / HEIC / WebP / asset variants.

Migrating from flutter_image_compress

Same FlutterImageCompress method names and core parameters as the upstream — only a handful of legacy knobs have been dropped. If you used the defaults, step 1 is likely the only one that touches your code:

Swap the package name in pubspec.yaml and every import from flutter_image_compress to flutter_image_compress_lite.
Drop the numberOfRetries parameter from any call site. Decode-time OutOfMemoryError surfaces as a COMPRESS_ERROR PlatformException.
Drop the inSampleSize parameter from any call site.
If you catch on Error to handle CompressError, switch to Exception (or the bare catch (e)) — CompressError implements Exception here.

Errors

UnsupportedError is thrown when the requested encoding is unsupported on the current platform:

WebP encoding on iOS (decoding works)
HEIC encoding on Android < API 28 (Android 9)

CompressError is thrown for invalid input caught Dart-side (empty image bytes, missing file).

PlatformException is thrown by the native side when something goes wrong below the channel. Both platforms surface the same core codes:

FILE_NOT_FOUND — the source file could not be read.
BAD_IMAGE — the source bytes/file could not be decoded into an image.
WRITE_FAILED — the compressed output could not be written to the target path (compressAndGetFile only).

It can also carry these defensive codes (unreachable from the public Dart API):

BAD_ARGS — channel arguments are missing, of the wrong type, or carry an unknown format index. Both platforms.
COMPRESS_ERROR — Android-only catch-all for any other native failure (e.g. a HeifWriter error or an OutOfMemoryError).

License

Same as upstream: MIT